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Best Music of 2022

The 11 best experimental albums of 2022.

OHYUNG's imagine naked! is one of NPR Music's top 11 experimental music albums of 2022. Photo Illustration: Jackie Lay/NPR/Jess X. Snow/Courtesy of the artist hide caption

OHYUNG's imagine naked! is one of NPR Music's top 11 experimental music albums of 2022.

The Best Music of 2022

Music not only has the power to transport but transform. "Experimental" music, a nebulous grouping of difficult-to-classify sounds, provides us lovely, sometimes challenging fractal windows to jump through — to escape, commune, blister and rattle, to try and express our edges and witness the unknown. In 2022, for us, this encompassed microtonal rock jams, tender ambient, woozy nostalgia, Egyptian ghosts and an epic synth symphony.

Below, find an unranked list of the year's most exploratory music, along with some personal favorites, by NPR Music staff and contributors.

Lucrecia Dalt, ¡Ay!

¡Ay! is Lucrecia Dalt 's sci-fi missive from space to Earth; or vice versa. The Colombian experimentalist tells an extraterrestrial's story through bolero, salsa, mambo, son and jazz submerged in a colloquial, nostalgic haze. The alien Preta's interpretations of home, love and the limits of having a body resonate exponentially against a textured, acoustic backdrop, a product of human imagination seeking to operate outside of its chains of time, form and grief. Dalt's world-building in sound and theme are jarring in its invention, yet altogether familiar. —Stefanie Fernández

OHYUNG, imagine naked!

Whenever I needed a pacifier this year — in need of something that would bring me down not just to Earth but safely back to the very apartment room I was likely sitting in, imagine naked! was there. It makes sense: Robert Ouyang Rusli, who records tender ambient like this under the name OHYUNG , based its song titles on lines from a poem by t. tran le, titled "Vegetalscape," that summons deep magic from scenes of the everyday. That Rusli also composes for film makes perfect sense; mine might be titled Post-Pandemic Basement Boy. —Andrew Flanagan

Caterina Barbieri, Spirit Exit

The Italian electronic composer Caterina Barbieri thinks deeply about the spiritual impact of her music on the bodies and minds of others. Her intense album Spirit Exit was created in isolation during Milan's strict pandemic lockdown, inspired by hermetic visionaries including the mystic nun St. Teresa of Ávila and Emily Dickinson. Barbieri's layered tracks build and explode massively into moments of bliss, as if to musically recreate Ávila's ecstatic vision of being stabbed in the heart by an angel. —Hazel Cills

Nancy Mounir, Nozhet El Nofous

Nancy Mounir's Nozhet El Nofous is a conversation with the past. The Cairo-based composer and instrumentalist weaves aching arrangements around crackling recordings of 1920s Egyptian singers. In translations provided, we grasp how Mounir's own violin, bass and piano dance seamlessly with beautiful Arabic poetry of love, torment and darkness — characters who express longing and sorrow with the same nostalgic verve of what Brazilians call saudade . The ghostly effect, however, isn't haunting, but an empathetic hand across time. — Lars Gotrich

Evgueni Galperine, Theory of Becoming

Describing his music as an "augmented reality of acoustic instruments," the Paris-based composer masterfully displays his own personal orchestra of sounds derived from, but unheard in, the real world. Trumpet fanfares get twisted, strings shed a kind of rusty patina and who knows what produces that sublime subterranean bellowing. Each of Evgueni Galperine 's 10 pieces unspool like soundtracks to fevered dreams. In the final vignette, "Loplop im Wald," we're captive deep in the forests of surrealist painter Max Ernst, complete with ominous drum beats, woozy strings and a disturbing whistler. —Tom Huizenga

Gavilán Rayna Russom, Trans Feminist Symphonic Music

At 1 hour, 11 minutes, Trans Feminist Symphonic Music is maybe the only project on our list that, though wordless, successfully expresses as much information as a novella. The piece's first movement, "Elegy," folds and bounces within itself, bringing to mind, in both its aesthetic and its peacefully anxious rhythm, Manuel Göttsching's monumental modular album E2-E4 , from 1984. But unlike Göttsching, tranquility and innovation aren't the aim here; Gavilán Rayna Russom is legibly investigating the futility of binaries through the spooky actions of sound. The discordant meditations in the second movement, "Expansions," slide away for the transfixing and daydreamy "Beauty," before settling into the project's rhetorical core in its final movement, "Truth." The whole is greater than the sum of its already-magnificent parts — its conclusion, which is objectively correct, is that there are no right answers when it comes to the act of human being. —Andrew Flanagan

Joe Rainey, Niineta

Since the age of 8, Joe Rainey — a self-described Ojibwe "urban Indian," raised near Minneapolis' tribal locus of Little Earth — has captured 500 hours of powwow ceremonies, emerging as a powerhouse singer on the competitive circuit himself. Niineta is his debut collaboration with empathetic and attentive producer Andrew Broder; they crosshatch Rainey's archives with his own visceral melismas, turning it into a master storyteller's coat of arms across a ruptured firmament of mauling drums and sculptural squelch. Solemn but funny, vulnerable but aggressive, the messages are gripping, even if the tongue is unfamiliar. Rainey is at the radical edge of a wave of Indigenous experimental expression and acceptance in the United States. Niineta is his undeniable opening statement. —Grayson Haver Currin

Horse Lords, Comradely Objects

Into polyrhythms lately? Want sounds so mathy that they feel like they're made of fractions? Can't find your old copy of Neu! ? Do I have an incredibly specific album for you. Angular Baltimoreans — addicted to the tasty, old-school flavor of the West German avant-garde guitar minimalists — can't help themselves from chugging lavishly with guitars and saxophones for a violently kosmische album that sounds like 40 different looms weaving a tapestry. You would think this whole thing would be fustier per the weight of their admitted influence ("Russian Constructivism," which is to say, a utopian art movement that wants less commodity-fetishism and more utility-fetishism), but this album succeeds for feeling strangely rustic in its human filigree. —Mina Tavakoli

Anna Butterss, Activities

In terms of composition, the bassist Anna Butterss seems to shadow-chop through her songs, finding weak spots in their otherwise sparkling walls to pound a hole for peeking through. What lies beyond is anyone's guess (maybe hers most of all). Activities transitions fluidly and ceaselessly between — literally, between — jazz, classical, pop, avant-dance and nursery rhymes, the work of an artist at near-peak technicality having nothing but fun. —Andrew Flanagan

Ian William Craig, Music for Magnesium_173

Armed with a beautifully trained voice and a bank of custom tape decks that loop, slur and hiss, the Canadian artist has created limitless layers of decaying beauty over the span of 12 tracks. In "Attention For It Radiates," choral flourishes, dressed in William Basinski-like distortion, slowly oscillate, while in "Sprite Percent World Record" a single voice barely surfaces above lovely thickets of drone. Originally composed for a computer game, these expansive, slow-motion canvasses, with their desiccated resplendence, stand completely on their own and remain among the most arresting and immersive music released this year. —Tom Huizenga

Björk, fossora

The global grief we've shared during the last few years didn't limit, of course, our individual suffering; it merely made those cuts deeper. Björk used the space of the pandemic to consider her mother's 2018 death and how the influence of a mortal may become immortal through others, reaching ever outward like a mushroom's hyphae. The result, fossora , is a riot of new growth after a deluge. Armies of meticulous if vertiginous woodwinds and strings prance around Björk's singular voice , able to command and comfort at once. "Hope is a muscle that allows us to connect," she beams three minutes in, relentless hardcore drums hammering home this point so that we may never again forget it. These love songs, arguably the most audacious of her career, are brilliant blooms at a perceived new dawn. —Grayson Haver Currin

And 10 more, in no particular order:

Patrick Shiroishi, Evergreen Patrick Shiroishi made 18 records in 2022, all compelling; his finale, Evergreen , is the most exquisite. Using field recordings from the Los Angeles cemetery where his ancestors are buried, the saxophonist builds lush meditative spaces for considering the power that past holds over present. —Grayson Haver Currin

Rachika Nayar, Heaven Come Crashing A mesmerizing album that blends soul-crushing electronica and the Brooklyn composer's gloomy, signature guitar into a cinematic opus. —Hazel Cills

Bill Orcutt, Music for Four Guitars This is antechamber music spit like a piping-hot tar-loogie from the punkest guitar player ever. Yet these choppy, euphoric miniatures are somehow beautiful in their psychic bleed-through. — Lars Gotrich

Peter Coccoma, A Place to Begin Peter Coccoma's annual, winterly sojourn to a sparse island on Lake Superior sitting just off the coast of Minnesota's arrowhead was extended indefinitely by a certain global displeasure not too many years ago. The composer enjoyed the trapped time, though, and spent it well, fastidiously outlining the soul of a unique and quiet corner of the world in these sparse, lush pieces. —Andrew Flanagan

Clarice Jensen, Esthesis Lighter on the drones this time, the restless cellist and composer explores a broader sound world with help from pianist Timo Andres, in music layered with sensations. —Tom Huizenga

claire rousay, wouldn't have to hurt At its best, claire rousay's work can function like a poignant film score, with subtle layers of sound — iridescent electronics, spare piano — highlighting the emotional core of seemingly pedestrian moments. This absorbing EP stares down suffering and tries to transmute it into anything tolerable, be it friendship or mere understanding. —Grayson Haver Currin

Marina Herlop, Pripyat The Catalan composer's album is a work of truly alien music, twisting her freaky, high vocals and piano into soundscapes not of this world. —Hazel Cills

Vanessa Rossetto, The Actress Rossetto layers field recordings and instruments not as a canvas but emotional portraits that you move with your mind. An experience that changes on every listen. —Lars Gotrich

Tanya Tagaq, Tongues "They tried to take our tongues," the Inuk throat singer murmurs on this potent manifesto, demanding to reclaim what colonization has stolen from her culture. —Tom Huizenga

Lamin Fofana, The Open Boat The Sierra Leonean producer gives us a mysterious map, but there doesn't seem to be a ship capable of navigating its extraterrestrial electronics and submerged beats. —Lars Gotrich

• Nancy Mounir
• Evgueni Galperine
• Lucrecia Dalt
• Caterina Barbieri
• Anna Butterss
• Horse Lords
• Ian William Craig
• Gavilán Rayna Russom

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The Best Jazz and Experimental Music of 2021

Whether recorded remotely, live, or in-studio, the jazz and experimental music that left the biggest impression this year did so primarily because it challenged us to find momentum in life. In jazz, Anthony Joseph summoned Shabaka Hutchings and Jason Yarde for a quest to take political poetry as far as he could, and the Luke Stewart & Jarvis Earnshaw Quartet crafted a set split between meditative rumination and active discontent. In experimental music, Bill Orcutt overdubbed himself on an expansive collaboration with Chris Corsano, the Vietnamese trio Rắn Cạp Đuôi spliced together inscrutable psychedelic collages, and Fire-Toolz delivered a double LP packed with everything from screamo to ambient.

While it would be difficult to land on one element that is shared by the records and songs here, not one of these musicians took the beaten path. Model Home lengthened their cut-up jams, Carmen Q. Rothwell allowed the city to add another dimension to her upright bass-filled songs of regret, and ---__--___ (the musicians Seth Graham and More Eaze) produced a crushing soundscape out of manipulated vocals.

Below, we round out entries culled from our overall albums list and overall songs list with more releases just as worthy of your time, listed alphabetically.

Check out all of Pitchfork’s 2021 wrap-up coverage here .

(All releases featured here are independently selected by our editors. When you buy something through our retail links, however, Pitchfork may earn an affiliate commission.)

Orange Milk

---__--___: The Heart Pumps Kool​-​Aid

Orange Milk co-founder Seth Graham and Austin electronic artist More Eaze are the animating forces behind The Heart Pumps Kool-Aid , their first record together. The pair’s warped electro-acoustic arrangements bridge the void between feral noise and gauzy glimmer. Vocals from guests like Karen Ng, recovery girl, and Koeosaeme are processed to such a degree that they sound like travelers teleporting through the uncanny valley. Strings snarl and howl alongside twisting electronic gnarls on “Sadness, Infinite America … shit,” yielding to the delicate sparkle that leads the early stretch of “In Memory of Simon Kingston” (a song commemorating a New York musician who died at 21 last year). As a harsh vocal scrape interrupts its glistening surface, the record’s collision of elegant idealism and astringent reality is crystallized. –Allison Hussey

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal

Heavenly Sweetness

Anthony Joseph: The Rich Are Only Defeated When Running for Their Lives

Little distinction exists between speech and music on The Rich Are Only Defeated When Running for Their Lives , which the British-Trinidadian poet Anthony Joseph assembled with a crew of jazz players including saxophonist-composer-arranger Jason Yarde and multi-reed wizard Shabaka Hutchings. Joseph brings the cadence of solos to his declamations of personal and diasporic history, placing musicality at the center of his poetry. When he recounts being “flung so far from any notion of nation” as a young immigrant on “Calling England Home,” his voice gathers depth and grit like a horn breaking into its woody lower register. The saxes, in turn, offer speechlike interjections, conveying urgent and expressive solidarity with every phrase. –Andy Cush

New Amsterdam

Arooj Aftab: Vulture Prince

​​When the Pakistani singer Arooj Aftab started recording Vulture Prince , she had no plans for an elegy. But then her brother died, as did a close friend. In tracing the shape of these new absences in her life, her mind went to the Urdu ghazals of her childhood, music and poetry filled with boundless, near-erotic longing for God. Aftab reimagined these ghazals, scored for only soft, stringed instruments—harp, stand-up bass, acoustic guitar, some violin. These sounds call clearly to each other across moonlit space, and Aftab’s voice cuts a path through the darkness in front of it, one line, one footfall, at a time. Jarred out of time, her grief (and ours) softens and grows overwhelmingly beautiful. –Jayson Greene

Arushi Jain: “Richer Than Blood”

“Richer Than Blood,” the opening track on Brooklyn-based composer Arushi Jain’s debut album Under the Lilac Sky , is deceptively simple. It only consists of two elements: her gentle vocals and the burbling drones of a modular synth. And yet, Jain makes each tool at her disposal feel so much grander: She layers her vocals to sound like a room full of singers harmonizing with each other, and she uses her synth to mimic the effect of an entire string orchestra tuning their instruments before a performance. It’s an introduction that leaves you breathlessly anticipating whatever comes next. —Sam Sodomsky

Listen: Arushi Jain, “Richer Than Blood”

Carmen Q. Rothwell: Don’t Get Comfy / Nowhere

Carmen Q. Rothwell sings of grief and heartbreak with remarkable restraint across Don’t Get Comfy / Nowhere , her debut album. Often, she’s accompanied by little more than her own harmonies, as on the opening “Don’t Get Comfy.” And, on the lead single “Blissful Ignore,” the New York singer-songwriter and upright bassist allows her voice to follow the melodic counters of her instrument, letting car honks and more city noises leak into the song—it feels like watching her perform through an open window. The album thrives on the meeting of reservation and vulnerability, and its songs feel as emotional and virtuosic as a power ballad yet are sparse and withholding as a Rembrandt. –Matthew Strauss

Chris Corsano / Bill Orcutt: Made Out of Sound

With its first notes, Made Out of Sound departs from previous recordings by the long-running free-improv team of guitarist Bill Orcutt and drummer Chris Corsano: There are two guitars here, not just one. Where albums like 2018’s Brace Up! had the searing in-the-moment intensity of live documents, this one was assembled remotely from opposite coasts. Rather than try to mask the artifice, Orcutt leans into it by doubling himself, turning their duo into a virtual trio. Perhaps as a result, Made Out of Sound is oceanic where past records were pointillistic, enveloping you in waves of harmony rather than pushing you through hairpin turns. The overdubs—and the chiaroscuro cover photo—suggest an affinity with Odds Against Tomorrow , Orcutt’s solo masterpiece from 2019. Like that record, Made Out of Sound is often breathtakingly beautiful, albeit in unconventional ways, finding moments of serenity and contemplation amid the turbulence. –Andy Cush

Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify

Circuit des Yeux: “Dogma”

A dear friend’s death, a lonely artist residency, an intractable bout of writer’s block: Circuit des Yeux mastermind Haley Fohr was having a hell of a hard go of things. “Dogma,” the militantly lithe rock track on - io , an album of otherwise pillowy orchestral dimensions, serves as Fohr’s stubborn note-to-self: Keep moving and keep busy, and you might just keep it together. “Tell me how to feel right/Tell me how to see the light,” she commands over drums so mighty they stanch the synthesizer din creeping beneath her. Through this forward motion, she cultivates the strength to survive, at least until answers about what’s next come easier. –Grayson Haver Currin

Listen: Circuit des Yeux, “Dogma”

American Dreams

Claire Rousay: a softer focus

Scattered throughout Claire Rousay’s a softer focus are snippets of her daily life: the sounds of a typewriter, a blaring swirl of cicadas, barely audible conversations. Swathed in swells of drone, half-remembered melodies, and strings saturated with melancholy, these prosaic sounds become monumental, activating a powerful sense of nostalgia for moments of quiet reflection and human connection. The abstract pieces on a softer focus are made potent by their suggestive familiarity, each sound a potential trigger for our own memories—happy, sad, or, more likely, somewhere in between. –Jonathan Williger

Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal

Rough Trade

Dean Blunt: Black Metal 2

The latest cryptic transmission from British singer-songwriter Dean Blunt is unsparing yet beautiful in its quest for hope in an increasingly despondent world. Blunt refuses allegiance to any single ideology, preferring instead to sprinkle provocative questions about Black rage before vanishing into the shadows. He perfects this approach in the taunting yet empathetic final lines of “MUGU”: “Let it out, nigga, let it out,” he sighs, “show them crackers what you’re all about.” Black Metal 2 doesn’t concede any of Dean Blunt’s mystique, but it’s the closest to a straight answer he’s given yet. –Brandon Callender

Eli Keszler: Icons

When the COVID-19 shutdown kept people inside , percussionist and composer Eli Keszler turned his attention to the emptied streets. Icons uses on-location recordings of an uncharacteristically calm pandemic-era New York City to frame foreboding ambient mood pieces defined by vibraphone, glockenspiel, piano, and drums. An uneasy percussive skitter underlies the gleaming sound of gamelan bars on “Evenfall,” and Keszler finds a similar impressionistic beauty in the still of decline throughout the album. –Evan Minsker

Hausu Mountain

Fire-Toolz: Eternal Home

In the ’80s and ’90s, thrifty punk bands sometimes dubbed albums onto cassettes that they’d gotten (or stolen) for free from Christians or motivational speakers. If you focused your ears, you might catch a hint of the original audio grayed out between blasts of hardcore. Angel Marcloid’s Eternal Home operates on a similar principle: It’s a bizarre palimpsest piling up layers of progressive rock, Weather Channel synths, classical minimalism, IDM beat trickery, and screamo. Unlike those lo-fi tapes of yore, though, the Chicago musician’s work is almost shockingly hi-def, every grunge-inspired guitar solo, DX7 chime, and larynx-shredding howl leaping from the speakers in a blast of finely chiseled violence. Yet for all the sensory overload of Marcloid’s 78-minute opus, Eternal Home makes for a surprisingly immersive and even welcoming listen once you acclimate to its everything-goes-to-11 aesthetics. And if you’re looking for hidden messages, Marcloid’s mantra-like lyrics—“I’m owed strength now”; “We may as well be mushrooms”—offer plenty to puzzle over, buried beneath the barrage of stimuli. –Philip Sherburne

Floating Points / Pharoah Sanders / The London Symphony Orchestra: Promises

It begins atomically, with a building block made of seven notes twisting around like a helix. Around this motif Promises blinks to life, a self-regenerating ecosystem in nine movements. This hybrid electronic/jazz/orchestral piece doesn’t feel composed so much as monitored by Sam Shepherd, the boundless electronic composer who performs as Floating Points. Whether arranging the London Symphony Orchestra’s oceanic swells or tapping out notes on a harpsichord that seems to be falling slightly out of tune, Shepherd lays down a framework for the eminent free jazz saxophonist Pharaoh Sanders to follow and then thrillingly disregard.

Sanders is the central voice and shining star of Promises , his first major recording in a couple of decades, and one of 2021’s greatest musical gifts. He trots to one idea, floats to another, then sprints to a third, exploring the universe Shepherd has cast for him and spinning out new meanings for its restless, incessant seven-note central motif. This is the endless joy of Promises : listening to Sanders feel his way through this alien world as if newly born into it. It leaves such a unique impression that although you are listening to music, you are also witnessing its evolution. –Jeremy D. Larson

Grouper: Shade

Grouper’s Liz Harris pulls you in close on Shade . Her new songs are characteristically intimate, offering quiet truths and rapturous noise that require close focus. The individual components feel familiar—the hushed vocals, tape hiss, and sound of fingertips sliding up guitar strings—but Harris’ fingerpicked melodies and gutting poetry manage to explore new depths of her bottomless sound. Lean in enough and you’ll hear her ponder the light and the clouds, contending with the gravitational pull of darkness: “Bury those thoughts real deep/Bury those bodies deep/Put us back to sleep.” It’s a crushing flash of insight delivered like a whispered secret. –Evan Minsker

Mexican Summer

L’Rain: Fatigue

In the hands of Brooklyn artist Taja Cheek, music can be nonlinear and unpredictable without sacrificing grooves and hooks. As L’Rain, her blend of hi- and lo-fi techniques spawns songs that call for a half-dozen genre descriptors—avant-garde, psych-soul, with a side of musique concrète?—and refuse to resolve in an expected way. Her second album, Fatigue , is a symphony of fleeting, hyper-specific sound, from the opulent keyboard arpeggios that open “Two Face” and the swampy bass driving “Suck Teeth” to the heartfelt guitar interplay on “Blame Me” and the ingenuous rhythmic repetition of the phrase “make a way out of no way”—a line borrowed from Cheek’s late mother, Lorraine—on “Find It.” L’Rain songs can be one small idea or 10 overlapping ones, 17 seconds or six minutes, built around a single loop or encompassing upwards of 20 players. The works on Fatigue mimic the nature of grief and change, the haze and backsliding and dark thoughts. Through these vivid fragments, Cheek’s worldview comes across clearly: The best way to achieve growth is through unhindered exploration. –Jillian Mapes

Sargent House

Lingua Ignota: Sinner Get Ready

Kristin Hayter’s voice, stacked tall atop itself, holds you from a terrifying height. On her latest album as Lingua Ignota, she reckons with devotion and loneliness in rural Pennsylvania, using its spare landscape and its musical and religious history as the fertile backdrop for her work. Between Appalachian instruments and prepared piano, she sings like she’s on the cusp of physical collapse, running her voice ragged only for it to surge into a roar. The point where exhaustion snaps into adrenaline is her starting ground. From there, she traces the contours of human faith, gumming the jagged edges where it breaks. –Sasha Geffen

Luke Stewart & Jarvis Earnshaw Quartet: Luke Stewart & Jarvis Earnshaw Quartet

Luke Stewart and Jarvis Earnshaw create a fiery set of titanic jazz, exploring the possibilities of the genre by moving from transcendental meditation to off-center bebop. Stewart’s bass is swift, and it’s easy to be left stunned by how quickly his hands seem to be running across the instrument. Earnshaw’s sitar is used equally for creation and destruction, bringing the former with gentle picking and the latter with improvisation. Devan Waldman’s sprightly alto sax solos and Ryan Sawyer’s tempered drumming elevate the proceedings further, enhancing the sense that you are hearing the players push themselves towards something new. -Hubert Adjei-Kontoh

MATTIE: “Human Thing”

A cybernetic cry into the wilderness, this single from MATTIE appeared out of the ether towards the beginning of March and has yet to wear out its welcome. Produced by MATTIE and Black Taffy, “Human Thing” is a stuttering behemoth of burnt-out snares, guttural bass, and MATTIE's inimitable yelp. Lying somewhere between a club banger and an industrial rock number, this track imprisons you in its reverb in order to ask, “Have you ever loved a human?” -Hubert Adjei-Kontoh

Listen: MATTIE, “Human Thing”

Don Giovanni

Model Home: both feet en th infinite

Listening to Model Home ’s both feet en th infinite feels like stumbling upon some mysterious radio frequency—if you bump your dial up a millimeter, you might lose it forever. The new album from the Washington D.C. duo sounds subterranean, emanating from a basement cluttered with cables and mixing boards. Vocalist NappyNappa and electronic tinkerer Patrick Cain take a painterly approach to their songs, shading them with strokes of space-age funk, grimy disco, and underground hip-hop. Tracks like “Ambition” and “Body Power,” with their peripheral chatter and rambling lyrics, harness the spirit of an impromptu performance at a house show—a snapshot of one night that can never be fully replicated. —Madison Bloom

Moor Mother: Black Encyclopedia of the Air

On her first release for eclectic indie mainstay ANTI-, experimental noise poet Moor Mother transmits radical messages softly. Black Encyclopedia of the Air is far more hushed than her harsh dispatches of the past. The album nods to ’90s R&B, ambient, and cosmic jazz, and is packed with features from her expanding artistic community including Alabama’s Pink Siifu, and members of her own Philadelphia-based collective, Black Quantum Futurism. Moor Mother mines the same wreckage that she has always confronted—particularly the prolonged effects of intergenerational trauma—but here, she conquers it in a state of relative tranquility. –Madison Bloom

Nala Sinephro: Space 1.8

Space 1.8 earns its astronomical title through frontier-breaking ambition. Its influences are distinctly throwback—Eric Dolphy’s investigations of the clarinet, both Coltranes’ search for an infinite cry—but the album isn’t content to replicate what worked in the past. London’s Nala Sinephro, utilizing both the harp and synthesizer, guides her band through a muted rumble that pricks the ears with both small deviations and seismic overtures alike. It’s heavy music delivered with a light touch. –Hubert Adjei-Kontoh

Subtext / Multiverse

Rắn Cạp Đuôi: Ngủ Ngày Ngay Ngày Tận Thế

Rắn Cạp Đuôi, a trio based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, works largely via improvisation, a practice you can hear through the boundless, structureless recordings on their debut album, Ngủ Ngày Ngay Ngày Tận Thế . The group then stitches together those pieces digitally, a process that becomes evident through the abrupt cuts and shifts that make the album feel like a glitching, psychedelic collage, inverting the atmosphere right when you think they’ve settled into a groove. Often, they highlight the ghostly, in-between states of their performances, as in the highlight “Aztec Glue,” which incorporates their closest thing to a conventional melody between a staticky procession of pulsing synths. By the time you think you’ve figured out what this sound is, they’ve already moved on to a new one. This volatility may be the point. —Sam Sodomsky

Carrying Colour

Rosie Lowe / Duval Timothy: Son

The emotions that Duval Timothy can unleash with a simple series of chords is unparalleled, and on this collaborative album with the English singer Rosie Lowe, he manages to make 20 minutes feel like an eternity. On the titular track, Lowe’s vocals are transformed from a whispered lullaby to a firmament-shaking choir. With minimal instrumentation, the two create a towering hymn that yawns into the distance. It’s the type of album where each track has enough gravitas to be an album closer, yet the actual conclusion “Gonna Be” manages to reach a level of intensity that catches you in your throat. High pitched voices sing “gonna be,” and they are paired with piano and double bass (played by Tom Herbert). As the song ends, only the double bass is left playing, delivering you into its mighty resonance. -Hubert Adjei-Kontoh

Self-released

Shubh Saran: Inglish

Inglish —the second full-length from guitarist, composer, and producer Shubh Saran —sprouted from several entwined roots. The Bangladesh-born son of Indian diplomats, Saran lived in Dhaka, Cairo, Geneva, New Delhi, Toronto, and Boston before planting himself in New York City around 2014. Saran’s new album is a product of his multinational upbringing, incorporating Middle Eastern folk, progressive rock, Indian classical, and more in its unique jazz fusion. Inglish places bright electric guitar and modular synthesizers alongside instruments from India and the Middle East, often within the same song. Sprawling opener “Enculture” begins as a high-speed race through the desert, before careening into stretches of free jazz piano and skronking synth riffs that nod to Stevie Wonder’s “Higher Ground.” With these discrete elements, Saran forms a language all his own. —Madison Bloom

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal

Sacred Bones

SPELLLING: “Little Deer” 

Bay Area art-pop sorcerer Tia Cabral of SPELLLING reintroduced herself with “Little Deer,” the surging baroque opener of her fantastical third album The Turning Wheel . Evoking the audacious spirits of forebears like Minnie Riperton and Kate Bush, it is a fable-like tale of death and rebirth, of the never-quite-finished process of being a person. Joined by over a dozen musicians—brass, strings, woodwinds, conga, a choir—Cabral brings pop formalism and the questing spirit of ’70s soul orchestration into SPELLLING’s world, making a majestic entry into her sharpest album yet. –Jenn Pelly

Listen: SPELLLING, “Little Deer”

Tirzah: Colourgrade

The voltaic second album from London electronic artist Tirzah revolves around a close-knit, labyrinthine, and slightly crooked emotionality. Working alongside collaborators Mica Levi and Coby Sey, she reduces her formula to elemental parts in order to bring out a more tactile intimacy guided by improvisatory songwriting, looped samples, and ad-libbed vocals. The sparse impressions on tracks like the out-of-step “Beating” and the unsettled “Crepuscular Rays” are the result of years of friendship and community melted down into what sounds like a close, honest embrace. –Eric Torres

Tomu DJ: FEMINISTA

Tomu DJ finds safety in warm, loosely familiar spaces on FEMINISTA , her first full-length record. The California producer turned to music as she recovered from a traumatic 2019 car accident, and FEMINISTA extends her reach for reassurance. Indebted to club music at its core, the record opens with gentle pop-leaning numbers before leaping into more frenetic, skittering textures, each one stretching out into a self-contained universe. In addition to drawing on reggaetón, Top 40 Pop, and footwork, Tomu DJ has cited Janet Jackson’s The Velvet Rope as a heavy influence for her work. While FEMINISTA never quite makes a direct nod at its foremother, a kindred hazy sensuality shines through. –Allison Hussey

The Buddy System

Tyshawn Sorey / King Britt: “Untitled One”

“Untitled One,” the opening entry on drummer Tyshawn Sorey and producer King Britt’s self-titled album, is a hypnotic highwire act that careens towards improvisatory chaos yet ultimately keeps its balance. Britt grounds the track with calm synthetic notes before Sorey ventures toward the unknown, playing his drums rapidly and inviting Britt to experiment more, too. Britt responds in turn by playing his synthesizers more freely, and they grow louder and wilder before finally settling back into a metronomic groove. Britt and Sorey know just how much to give and how much to hold back on “Untitled One,” lest they lose their footing. –Matthew Strauss

Listen: Tyshawn Sorey / King Britt, “Untitled One”

Vijay Iyer / Linda May Han Oh / Tyshawn Sorey: Uneasy

Jazz maestro Vijay Iyer articulates the urgency of protest without shirking the sentimental on this album recorded with longtime collaborators Linda May Han Oh and Tyshawn Sorey. Iyer’s pin-heeled piano work hot-steps around in search of a sacred chord to alight upon, leaving shallow punctures across your heart as Oh and Sorey’s storm-flung rhythm section executes stomach-lurching shifts. Volatility abounds: The raucous paean “Combat Breathing” honors Eric Garner and Black Lives Matter with music that’s by turns fluid and transfixed, the sound of righteous fury opening channels for electricity to course between the many. –Jazz Monroe

What Is Experimental Music? With 7 Top Examples & History

If you've been thinking of expanding your musical horizons, you might want to try listening to experimental music.

This genre has elements of almost every other genre, making it one of the most diverse genres. As such, no matter what kind of music you gravitate toward, you can find experimental tracks that suit your tastes!

But what is experimental music, and what makes it unique?

Definition: What Is Experimental Music?

So, what is experimental music? Experimental music defies most traditional genre classifications.

This break from genre norms makes it challenging to create a precise definition of experimental music, as it can embody several characteristics of other genres without necessarily being part of them.

Because experimental music can exhibit traits of any music genre, identifying it can be challenging. Fortunately, you can use a handful of characteristics to determine whether a song is experimental.

Experimental Music Characteristics

Much like lo-fi music , experimental music spans nearly every genre, making it tricky to define and classify.

But three primary characteristics link experimental music, including:

• Unpredictability
• Use of multiple genres
• Unconventional instrumentation

Any song with one or more of these characteristics can fall into the “experimental” genre. Let's explore a few helpful examples that illustrate this.

7 Examples of Experimental Music

Because experimental music incorporates characteristics of all other genres, you can find experimental electronica, pop, and bluegrass music!

So long as a song is unpredictable and unconventional, it can be experimental. The following examples illustrate these characteristics beautifully.

Sun in My Mouth

This Björk track is from her 2001 album “Vespertine.” It features hints of classical and ambient music, but the heady lyrics and vocalization set it apart from more traditional examples of these genres.

The lyrics are poetic and abstract, though many have guessed they speak to sexual exploration or feminine desires that are often seen as taboo.

It's crucial to note that many experimental songs, in addition to utilizing unconventional timing and instrumentation, also present uncommon ideas and topics that are otherwise absent from traditional genres.

Who Could Win A Rabbit

With a cacophony of distorted guitar and vocalization, “Who Could Win A Rabbit” has an upbeat sound that hides a darker subtext.

These darker qualities become more noticeable as the song progresses, hinted at with beat-breaking breathing samples that eventually dissolve into broken dissonance and eerie sounds.

Barely two minutes long, this song is a quick snapshot of modern, pop-infused experimental music. It lacks a chorus, and its lyrics are abstract, with influences that seem to combine the experimental poetry written by E.E. Cummings and traditional nursery rhymes.

Thom Yorke, the lead vocalist of Radiohead, has created some of the most popular experimental songs of the last few decades. Some have even argued that many of Radiohead's albums fall within the genre.

However, his solo releases, including the 2006 album “The Eraser,” might be a better example of experimental music. Tracks like “Black Swan” show off his unique musical style and preferences, but they're not entirely divorced from his previous work, making them excellent footholds for fans of albums like “OK Computer.”

But be warned—this song does contain expletives, so it might not be the best track to play during a family car trip!

The Highest Flood

Matthew Barnes, better known as Forest Swords, has produced a list of groundbreaking tracks that feature unconventional instrumentation and pacing.

Though this artist's roots lie within the DJ community and genre, his modern experimental music contends with that of other well-known artists like Björk and Aphex Twin.

The 2017 track “The Highest Flood” exemplifies these qualities, utilizing repetitive samples, dissonant sounds, and spliced vocalizations to produce a distinct sound supported by consistent, soft orchestration. At just over five minutes long, it's lengthier than the average song.

“Branches” is one of the most oft-repeated John Cage creations, and it might be one of the most experimental songs ever created.

Not only does it come from the modern “father” of experimental music, John Cage, but its precise sound, tempo, and duration vary significantly from performance to performance. And in many ways, this is a track designed for live performance.

It consists of diegetic sounds produced by multiple performers tending to cacti. The pace of these sounds creates a rhythm that morphs, pauses, and quickens depending on the performer's actions.

While some might not consider “Branches” to be music, this John Cage track's controversial and experimental nature has helped it become an iconic part of the genre.

Canyons of Your Mind

Often likened to Frank Zappa and Warren Zevon, Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band (later shortened to Bonzo Dog Band) was a psychedelic, experimental phenomenon during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Perhaps best-known for the associations with Neil Innes and the British comedy troupe Monty Python, this band released several strange-yet-delightful tunes during their initial run, including “Canyons of Your Mind.”

Lead vocalist Vivian Stanshall begins the tune with a buttery-smooth, Elvis-esque croon, but things soon devolve into spasm-like screams and a single, unapologetic belch. Without a doubt, this song oozes unpredictability, one of the hallmarks of the experimental music genre.

The music released by Punch Brothers generally falls within the bluegrass genre. But there's a good chance you've never heard bluegrass music quite like theirs!

Their fourth studio album, “Phosphorescent Blues,” contains several tracks showing lead vocalist Chris Thile's passion for experimental music, but “My Oh My” has the most heavy-handed experimental influences.

This song's meaning is straightforward enough, discussing the need to appreciate and feel grateful for the small gifts and treasures found in one's life. But the musical composition is varied, jumping from rock-like, aggressive strumming to gentle, slower-paced instrumentation.

Both fast-paced and sentimental, the only checkbox this song doesn't fill is unconventional instrument use.

5 Top Experimental Musicians

Many notable bands and musicians have dabbled (and continue to dabble) in the experimental genre. Though the work of these artists can also fall into more traditional categories like rock, R&B, or indie, their songs tend to be anything but traditional.

Let's briefly discuss a handful of the most popular and well-known bands and musicians that have helped expand and develop the experimental music genre.

Aphex Twin is considered one of the first forms of electronic experimental music.

Though Aphex Twin's first album (“Selected Ambient Works 85–92”) was released in 1992, many of the songs created by this artist (full name Richard David James) are still celebrated today for their creative and unusual lyrics, structure, and use of electronic sound.

Some of the most popular Aphex Twin tracks include “Windowlicker” and “Come to Daddy,” both of which have controversial and experimental corresponding music videos. If you enjoy ambient and electronica genres, you may enjoy listening to this experimental artist's music.

Animal Collective

Animal Collective takes the traditional form and sound of pop music and turns it on its head, resulting in a new take on the experimental genre that may appeal to listeners who tend to avoid unconventional music.

Their 2009 album “Merriweather Post Pavilion” is a fantastic example of this distinct style. Named after a music venue in Maryland, this album has several features that make it a notable example of the experimental genre.

Its length is a palindrome (54 minutes and 45 seconds), and tracks vary from a more traditional 3 minutes and 52 seconds to a far lengthier 6 minutes.

Instead of relying on traditional instrumentation, the band utilized samplers to produce this album, giving it a mixed-media feel that other pop songs of the time lacked.

Still, Animal Collective has continued to push boundaries throughout later albums, and much of their work has inspired changes within the primary pop genre.

Even if you've never listened to experimental music, there's an excellent chance you've heard of Icelandic artist Björk.

Björk has developed herself as one of the most genre-expanding artists of the 21st century. Her eclectic and eccentric style has helped her become an icon of post-modern experimental music.

Many Björk songs feature ambient, pop, and avant-garde elements, but they twist these elements into new forms that are distinctly different from more traditional examples.

Like Aphex Twin and Animal Collective, these tracks also correspond to equally experimental music videos, offering a visual representation of the unusual nature of the songs themselves.

If you're interested in exploring Björk's experimental side, you'll likely want to listen to her 2004 album “Medúlla.” The unpredictability of each track's length and composition ensures that this album adheres to nearly all the hallmarks of the experimental music genre.

Frank Zappa

Those who enjoy classic rock music may want to explore the many diverse and experimental albums of Frank Zappa.

Zappa , often compared to Captain Beefheart and the Bonzo Dog Band, created over 100 studio albums during his career. Though each of these albums is unique, they all feature early elements of experimental music, including unconventional song lengths and the combination of unharmonious pre-recorded sounds.

However, unlike much of the modern experimental music developed today, these tracks also had a traditional rock n' roll spine that added just enough structural familiarity to make them attractive to the average listener.

Portishead's music has been described as trip-hop, indie, and alternative. But the band doesn't seem to ascribe to these genre classifications, often preferring to be known for their innovative sound and creative style.

For this reason, Portishead falls within the experimental music genre, which becomes more noticeable when listening to tracks like “Roads” or “Numb.” These tracks have ambient, jazz, and alternative elements, but they combine them uniquely.

The band's 1994 album “Dummy” is often heralded as the most experimental, making it a fantastic starting place for those hoping to introduce themselves to the experimental music genre.

The History of Experimental Music

Despite experimental music's reputation for cutting-edge composition, it's older than other genres like new age or indie. After all, all new genres technically fall under the blanket term “experimental music” before earning a unique classification.

But you can trace the experimental music genre as we understand it today to a single person: John Cage.

John Cage was an American composer who began to develop the genre in the early 1950s. His fascination with music as a spontaneous activity inspired him to develop unpredictable tracks using unconventional instruments.

Much of Cage's work had a performance aspect that differentiated it from studio-recorded rock and pop music that was commonplace at the time. However, emerging genres and artists would soon take the reigns of the experimental genre, developing it even further.

The development of electronic instruments, electronica, and EDM helped expand the experimental genre's borders.

After all, experimenting with electronic sound can result in unusual beats and sounds. When these unconventional aspects are combined, they result in electronic experimental music. But instrumental innovation isn't the only aspect that influenced the burgeoning experimental genre.

A need for less-formulaic music also helped the genre develop and expand. Though standard pop and rock songs remain popular, their rigid structures can become a boring inevitability.

For example, almost all popular songs feature two to three stanzas and a chorus that falls between each stanza. Additionally, these songs adhere to a song time limit of about three minutes or less.

Modern experimental music doesn't adhere to these structural or time restrictions. Instead, it seeks to break these rules while remaining engaging and unfamiliar.

These qualities make experimental tracks easily identifiable, as they often sound completely different from songs belonging to other genres.

What Is Experimental Music? Final Thoughts

Experimental music is any type of audio track or song that doesn't fully belong to any other genre. This type of music might not be particularly melodic, it might not feature lyrics, and it might not feature traditional instrumentation.

Though challenging to define, you'll likely recognize experimental music as soon as you hear it. You can use the tracks listed throughout this article as an excellent starting point to explore the experimental music genre.

P.S. Remember though, none of what you've learned will matter if you don't know how to get your music out there and earn from it. Want to learn how to do that? Then get our free ‘5 Steps To Profitable Youtube Music Career' ebook emailed directly to you!

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The Best Fiction Books » Contemporary Fiction

The best experimental fiction, recommended by rebecca watson.

little scratch by Rebecca Watson

Experimental fiction often uses unusual forms of syntax, style, or form—perhaps taking the form of fragments, footnotes or parallel narratives. Here Rebecca Watson , author of the critically acclaimed experimental novel little scratch , recommends five of the best experimental novels and explains why a writer might choose to bend the rules—and to what effect.

Interview by Cal Flyn , Deputy Editor

When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife by Meena Kandasamy

The Lesser Bohemians by Eimear McBride

Between the Acts by Virginia Woolf

Diary of a Bad Year by J M Coetzee

Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill

1 When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife by Meena Kandasamy

2 the lesser bohemians by eimear mcbride, 3 between the acts by virginia woolf, 4 diary of a bad year by j m coetzee, 5 dept. of speculation by jenny offill.

T hanks for joining us on Five Books to discuss five of the best examples of experimental fiction. Could you tell us about your own novel little scratch , and its formal invention?

I guess the book is about the way that consciousness works; more specifically, present tense immediacy. That kind of consciousness. I think that it began with the challenge of feeling that prose does not really represent the bombardment and overwhelming simultaneity of everyday live experience. There’s so much going on. But when we write prose, we have this very neat, linear way in which we inhabit a moment. So my challenge was to represent the opposite of that on the page. Trauma can hyper-sensitise the ordinary, so it gave the experiment an extra charge.

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I split the page into channels. It breaks into two or three columns, goes between prose and half-prose. As you go down the page, you pass through time, and you have the internal, the external—sensory information, what you hear, what you smell—and how they, essentially, conflict with but also inform each other. It was kind of a game of association.

One of the things I found so interesting about it, and accurate—at least, according to my own experience of moving through the world—is how the interior monologue can be the defining element of a day. A theatre of drama, or conflict, when outwardly nothing is really happening. But as well as this issue of trauma it also struck me that your book was also fun , in how imaginative it was and how it told little jokes to itself. Do you think that’s important in experimental fiction, that sense of play?

Although perhaps ‘play’ is not the right word for the first book we’re going to discuss? This is When I Hit You by Meena Kandasamy. It’s about quite extreme domestic abuse; a woman marries an Indian intellectual who uses his ideas “as a cover for his own sadism.”

Um, actually I think you can use the word play. It’s uncomfortable, but the beauty of what she does is that she takes an incredibly disturbing centrepiece—this abusive marriage—and turns it into a creative challenge, and a performance.

It’s fiction, with an unnamed first-person narrator, and the narrator is telling the story retrospectively, about five years after these few months of marriage. It’s about how to tell the story: how do you go back and look at something so invasive, so encompassing, while reclaiming, or asserting, your sense of self.

“Experimental writing needs an openness and willingness from a reader, to go beyond what you might be used to”

What is the centre of the book is a playfulness about what it is to be a writer, and what it is to live a life—how we write narratives. And she has this very playful voice that shifts and flirts and diverts. It moves in lots of different registers.

I don’t think it looks experimental on the page. It’s the shifting register that makes it feel really, really new. Kandasamy studies the different vehicles of how to tell a story. The novel moves between prose poetry, to bits where it’s like a Q&A. The narrator is simultaneously the actor who breaks the fourth wall, and the writer dictating the stage directions. So even though we’re looking at this abusive marriage, most of the time this person is almost testing you to see if she can make you laugh, think, shift your expectations of a ‘victim’.

That’s interesting. I’ve actually come to Kandasamy backwards, I think. The first book of hers I read was her novella-memoir hybrid, Exquisite Cadavers . Which was written, I think, in response to how the earlier, highly garlanded novel was received. If When I Hit You does not appear overtly experimental on the page, Exquisite Cadavers certainly is—it’s split into two columns, one strand of which is fictional and the second a sort of metafictional commentary that reflects on her life and the writing process. One expects quite a lot of the reader, when writing in such a form. Or maybe you disagree?

I think we act like there’s more we need from the reader than we actually do. That’s the barrier for people getting into this kind of writing. I think often experimental fiction is used as a warning term rather than as a way of elaborating what the writing is.

Absolutely. The second book you’ve chosen is The Lesser Bohemians by Eimear McBride.

I had to look at this again yesterday, because although I have such a vivid recollection of the feeling of reading it, I couldn’t remember anything about it on a line level! I opened it and thought, ‘wow, so this is what it looks like.’ I guess because it’s so voice-led, you completely enter that head. It’s true consciousness. McBride’s really good at, like, skipping to the image of the association—the kind of narrative preamble, or narrative signposting, that writers often give she will skip, not because she’s trying to be cryptic, but because in real consciousness none of those things exist. You’ve instantly leapt to the next thought or sensation.

It’s a love story between an 18-year-old girl who just moved from Ireland to London to attend drama school, and the older actor she meets in a pub. They slowly unveil their stories to each other, but both are hiding parts of themselves.

Partly it’s about the unknowability of the other, but also the ability to learn so much through love. The lyricism of it is just something else. There’s such a music, such a lilt to it. There’s rhythm and movement to how you read it, any reader would get that. And that’s something incredible to establish.

A lot of people have remarked upon the sexually explicit nature of this book. But one wonders if sex is not perhaps the perfect experience to be rendered as stream of consciousness . I guess I’m also thinking of certain scenes in Ulysses , which McBride herself has talked about as a prime literary influence. But does McBride bring a new approach to this form?

Experimental fiction both points forward and back. We often describe things as new, when they are speaking as part of a tradition. But there is a noticeable newness to this book, and it’s in the deftness of language and the immersion—you feel so entirely in this person’s head whilst also being so clearly told a story. The way she gets inside people’s bodies, and writes sex in such a brilliant, honest and felt way. I think that is genuinely new. And if sex is something that is more instinctive, relies more on sensation and the unifying of desire and the body, then yes, surely experimental fiction serves that best: like sex, it defies a linear, straightforward recounting.

It was a highly anticipated follow up to her very acclaimed debut A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing . How similar are they—as books, as reading experiences?

Next up on our experimental fiction reading list is a Virginia Woolf book I admit I wasn’t familiar with: Between the Acts , her final novel which was published posthumously.

Yes, there’s a split over whether it was finished or not. She never did her final revise of it, and often she did do quite a lot of work in that act of revision. But it doesn’t read like something unfinished. It’s very, very accomplished, and one of my favourite of Woolf’s books.

It takes place at a village pageant in the summer preceding World War Two. I read it as a teenager and was so obsessed with it. I remember getting into an argument with a literature professor at an interview for a university that I very much got rejected from. It was so weird. We both loved Virginia Woolf, but both had very different visions of what that book was. I was young, so sure! I was the naïve one, more likely to be wrong but, at the same time, I remember this man puffing out—because I disagreed with him.

What I was making the case for—and what I still agree with—is how obsessed that book is with the idea of individualism versus society, the exhausting nature of being one person whilst also being so recognisably within the midst of a group, connected to other people.

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I remember him being like, ‘it’s about the war!’ And I was like, I get that it’s about the war, but it’s also about these other things. We just couldn’t connect. I mean, it is about the war,  to be fair—so much of it is about the burden of retrospect. It’s just before the war arrives, but they know the war is coming. Another war’s happened already. And so everything’s laced with this very aggressive, violent imagery. There’s something simmering. It’s all about living in what seems a simple present tense that’s about to combust into historical significance.

Let’s talk about J. M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year next. This is another one that’s pretty interesting to look at on the page. It’s separated into parallel narratives; could you tell us a little about the plot or rather plots, plural?

It begins with the page split into two, horizontally. We have on the top an extract from a book by an old Australian writer, called Strong Opinions . It’s political essays, stuff like that. That’s the top narrative, and initially the bottom narrative is him, first-person, his life as he’s writing the manuscript. Quickly he meets a woman called Anya, in the laundry room of his apartment building. He’s very struck by her, she’s very attractive, she’s a lot younger… there’s something about her that intrigues him. So he asks her to start typing up his manuscript for the book, the first narrative.

Suddenly she appears as a third column, or rather a horizontal division. So now you have the book, his first-person, her first-person. And each informs the others. So you see two perspectives – how she sees him, and how he sees her. He embroils her in his life, but she also embroils herself, because she and her boyfriend start to plot how to insinuate themselves. He’s got a lot of money—maybe they could get some of his cash.

“It sounds very complicated, but it’s incredibly easy to read, and it’s very profound”

You have these interfering narratives, and you can read across the double spread of the page, or down each page. Depending on which way you do it, you learn different things about each of the segments. That sounds very complicated, but it’s incredibly easy to read, and it’s very profound. This guy’s dying, so it’s about being a writer, how to make meaning, and the difference between the creator and the product—seeing this fallible human being behind the authoritative essay.

It does also have a very propulsive story. A classic narrative, of someone thinking they are intentionally bringing someone into their life, and at the same time they are being undone. Who has the power?

Mmm, yes. And this three-stranded form really represents exactly what you were getting at in the start of our conversation: the clarity of prose, the mess of reality. But one thing I suppose I worry about—and maybe other readers worry about this too—when you mention there are multiple ways of reading this book, I guess that allows for the possibility of reading it ‘wrong.’

I think that is often the reader’s fear. I always want to say to people: ‘Hey, don’t worry. Just trust yourself.’ That’s what I say to myself, sometimes. Readers often fear they don’t have the authority to tackle a text. Or just see it as something they have to ‘tackle.’ But a writer doesn’t write something with an authoritative insistence of how it should be read. They lay out a path of how to read it, and you as a reader will follow that – or make your own. little scratch , particularly, exists to be read in different ways, and the reader is meant to make their own choices. Depending on what choice they make, they get different things. That’s the same for Diary of a Bad Year ; those decisions are important, but they’re meant to be fun. They’re not meant to be a stress. The reader should remember that once the book is in their hands, they’re the authority. It’s their reading experience, they’re in control.

Just before we move on, I wanted to read you a quote from the Guardian : “The ensuing comedy of conflicting perspectives, of high rhetoric and low aims, is an amazingly strange thing for Coetzee to have decided to write.” What do you think about that? Is invention itself the aim?

I don’t know. I didn’t think it was strange. I mean maybe, in as much that it’s kind of crazy that it came out of someone’s head. But who are we to say what a writer will write next? And why would we want that to be predictable? The novel is exciting in its formal invention, but as a story in its own right, it’s interesting. The form is a way of getting you closer to the story. It’s not an indulgent thing.

Right, this brings us to our final work of experimental fiction. This is Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation , one of my own top favourite books. I think I’ve read it, honestly, upwards of 100 times. I carry it around on my phone, on my Kindle app, and just reread it on the bus, or anywhere. Do you feel the same? What do you like about it?

It’s quite a hard book to summarise, because it’s so much about those myriad moments that make up a life, or relationship, or anything. Firstly, it’s really funny. People don’t talk directly enough about how funny Jenny Offill is.

It’s essentially about a test of marriage, a kind of imperfect love story. Right? It’s both very sad and very funny.

Right. And it’s told in fragments, each of which are a sentence, or a paragraph, long.

You have these moments between the fragments to take a break, just to laugh, or absorb it. She takes the ordinariness of life and she makes it mean something. I think she proves why every moment of life can have significance, and how the quiet moments of existence contribute to our sense of self.

Last year, when her new book Weather came out, there was a picture of the fragments of Weather , how she’d rearrange them. Seeing that patchwork was amazing, because you can forget when a product is complete that so much work goes into the order of these things. Even just choosing the right ones… there will be so many rejected fragments. It affirmed the level of precision with which she works in order to create these novels.

She’s said that the gaps are moments for the reader to have an imagination. She doesn’t want to fill in the gaps. Because in doing so you eliminate or pin the story down. By fragmenting you allow the reader to immerse themselves in, be part of the world in a more intense way. The absences give the created world a greater imaginative potential.

I really enjoy fragmented fiction, especially this book. But as a style it’s recently become common enough—perhaps riding the wave of Offill’s success—to have inspired a rather funny satire of the form in Lauren Oyler’s new novel Fake Accounts . And of course, you’ve found mainstream success with little scratch. Do you feel like experimental fiction is becoming more influential, more popular?

I don’t know. I think that the fact that little scratch was published and accepted and treated as a novel speaks to a healthy publishing culture. Certainly there’s more space for it and, I think, more commercial viability, which is the key sign that people are open to it.

There’s still a lot of pushback. There’s still a strange treatment of experimental writing. And, you know, when I see people talking about my book, it’s the first thing they do, right? They say, ‘okay, guys, this looks weird, but don’t worry, you’re going to be able to get into it.’ There’s an apology at the beginning. I find that strange. ‘Experimental’ has taken on this negative association. It’s something that we have to forgive, that you can get something from despite it.

I think that kind of negates the whole purpose of this type of writing, which is to help immerse the reader further in the story. It serves a purpose. It’s there to do something beyond looking funny. It’s meant to open up new possibilities. I find it sad that it is often seen as a boundary. We are still very obsessed with keeping that boundary, putting the signpost up. I think we need to work on that.

Do you feel that is anti-intellectual, somehow?

Maybe? I think some readers fear they are being pushed away, or that it’s coded for a certain level of education, rather than for a general reader—which I don’t think is true.

But I think what you were saying earlier about being scared of not approaching the text ‘right’—those kind of insecurities, it’s not that formal or informal education helps you read better, but that maybe it gives you a level of self-trust. Sometimes we need an ego to trust ourselves as a reader. But it’s too complicated to make generalisations. Some think ‘experimental’ fiction is elitist, like it’s trying to shut out a certain reader. But all I can say for myself is that I’m writing for all readers. And I hope little scratch will show some readers who might feel hesitant over formally inventive writing, that shaking up the page can sometimes be a more natural way to read. It might bring you closer, rather than push you away.

April 12, 2021

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Rebecca Watson

Rebecca Watson is the author of little scratch , which is published by Faber in the UK and Doubleday in the US. She was picked as one of The Observer 's ten best debut novelists of 2021. Her work has been published in The TLS, The Guardian, Granta and elsewhere. In 2018, she was shortlisted for the White Review Short Story Prize. She works part-time as assistant arts editor at the Financial Times and lives in London.

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10 of the Best Experimental Poems Everyone Should Read

Poets, especially since the beginning of the twentieth century, have often sought increasingly new and radical ways of writing about the world. Modernists, Futurists, and postmodernists (among other schools and movements) have played around with language and form to create daringly original experimental works of poetry.

Below, we introduce ten of the greatest experimental poems produced in the last century or so. Our own Oliver Tearle, the founder of this blog, attempted to document the events of 2020 in an experimental poem – a sort of contemporary update of the modernist method – called The Tesserae , and his interest in earlier examples of experimental poems culminated in his own attempt to write one. This is, if you will, his ‘essential reading list’ for experimental poets.

1. Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘ A Dice Throw ’.

Alongside the vers libre experiments of Gustave Kahn, French poets at the end of the nineteenth century were playing around with verse form, and this example of free verse from Stephane Mallarmé is somewhat different, and can be regarded as an early example of concrete poetry. The poem was published in 1897, and uses much blank space between the words and lines of the verse. Follow the link above to read an excerpt from the longer (20-page) poem.

2. Mina Loy, Songs to Joannes .

Loy was born Mina Lowy to a Hungarian Jewish father and an English mother in London in 1882 (she changed her name to ‘Loy’ when she began submitting poetry). She studied art in London, Munich, and Paris, and her poetry reflects the continental avant-garde art that she encountered during her travels and studies.

Futurism is an important influence on Loy’s 1917 work Songs to Joannes , a long sequence that might be regarded as a modern, feminist take on the old Elizabethan sonnet sequence: here, the female poet addresses the male subject (Loy’s Futurist lover, Giovanni Papini), offering a frank and radically new take on the ‘love’ poem.

We discuss this poem in more detail here .

3. Hope Mirrlees, Paris .

The next two works on this list – also by female modernist poets – have both been likened to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land , although this first poem, written in 1919 and published a year later, predates Eliot’s famous poem by three years. The poem is unavailable online but is included in the  Collected Poems  of Mirrlees.

Paris: A Poem also makes Eliot’s 1922 poem look almost traditional by comparison, so radical is Mirrlees’ use of French avant-garde techniques – learned from Apollinaire, among others, whom she knew while living in Paris.

This long(ish) poem focuses on one day in Paris, 1 May 1919, seeking to capture the sights and sounds of the post-war metropolis using collage, unusual typefaces and spacing, and other innovative techniques. Virginia Woolf, who published the poem, described it as a nightmare to typeset – and it’s not hard to see why!

Discover more about this remarkable poem here .

4. Marianne Moore, ‘ Marriage ’.

Published in 1923, a year after Eliot’s The Waste Land , ‘Marriage’ is a long(ish) poem by one of American modernism’s greatest poets. And like The Waste Land , Moore’s poem is allusive, taking in Shakespeare and the Bible as the poet explores the obligations

and meaning of marriage (Moore herself never married). The poem is radical in both its form (modernist, free verse) and politics (we can label Moore’s treatment of marriage ‘feminist’).

5. T. S. Eliot, Sweeney Agonistes .

This unfinished work is amongst Eliot’s most daring, original, and experimental. Is it a dramatic poem, or a poetic drama? Only two scenes from the work were preserved, subtitled ‘Fragments of an Aristophanic Melodrama’ when Eliot published them.

Sweeney, a figure who had appeared in several of Eliot’s earlier poems, is a sort of modern-day Neanderthal, who talks about ‘doing a girl in’ in the most sinister manner possible, in a work which seems to be pushing the boundaries not just of verse but good taste …

6. E. E. Cummings, ‘ l(a ’.

Cummings (or perhaps that should be ‘cummings’, after the poet’s self-styled rejection of capitals) was one of the most distinctive American poets of the twentieth century, whose work built on the earlier modernists such as Williams.

A slender thing, this poem comprising a single sentence (if it can be called a sentence), with the phrase ‘a leaf falls’ placed parenthetically within the word ‘loneliness’. Probably inspired by the Japanese haiku form, this beautiful E. E. Cummings poem suggests a link between the eternal concept of loneliness and the fleeting motion of a falling leaf.

7. Ezra Pound, The Cantos .

Not so much a poem as a vast ‘ragbag’ of poems (to borrow Pound’s own word), The Cantos vary hugely in quality, although the Pisan Cantos, which Pound composed while a prisoner of the US in Pisa in 1945 just after the end of WWII, are the most critically acclaimed sections of this 800-page book.

Our advice is to begin with Canto I and wade through: Pound begins in medias res with a multi-layered poetic account of Odysseus’ journey into the underworld to seek counsel from Tiresias. Although the episode is from Homer’s Odyssey , Pound’s version of this story is told using a sixteenth-century Latin translation of Homer’s poem. You can read the opening canto by following the link above.

The poem thus immediately foregrounds Pound’s interest in multilingual poetry, the way such stories resonate for different cultures and eras, and the link between Odysseus’ summoning of the dead and Pound’s own use of dead poets’ words in his own work. We’ve analysed the opening canto here .

8. Edwin Morgan, ‘ The Computer’s First Christmas Card ’.

In this poem, the Scottish poet Edwin Morgan (1920-2010) gives us an unusual Christmas poem supposedly ‘written’ by a computer, and its attempt to produce the simple message ‘Merry Christmas’. A humorous poem from the 1960s about the early technology of the modern computer, it’s also a nice way into the experimental world of Morgan’s poetry.

9. David Jones, The Anathemata .

This is without doubt one of the most challenging experimental modernist poems of the last century – because Jones, a Welsh poet and painter, fuses poetry and prose, ancient British myth with modern poetic style, religious and secular themes, and much else.

It’s not as well-known as William Carlos Williams’s Paterson or Pound’s The Cantos , but it’s just as great an achievement in Anglophone modernist poetry. You can listen to Jones reading an excerpt from the poem by following the link above, or buy the whole book.

10. H. D., Helen in Egypt: Poetry (New Directions Books) .

This 1961 poem is on a similar scale to Ezra Pound’s The Cantos – and H. D. had been an associate of Pound’s during his Imagist phase in the years leading up to the outbreak of the First World War.

But this epic poem is on an altogether greater scale than the Imagist poem, and takes as its theme the alternative theory that Helen of Troy was not a Greek princess but an Egyptian woman. An important work of late modernism, and one of the great epic poems of the twentieth century, Helen in Egypt fuses the modernist novel with experimental poetry and even classical drama to create a work that is a true one-off.

Discover more about this fabulous work here .

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3 thoughts on “10 of the Best Experimental Poems Everyone Should Read”

I’m still trying to get a (affordable) copy of this!

https://interestingliterature.com/2021/10/best-radical-experimental-poems/?replytocom=57484#respond Which book do you mean Michael?

H D Helen in E – and I’ve just managed to get a copy!

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Renaissance of the Weird: Experimental Fiction as the New American Normal

John domini on amber sparks, percival everett, laura van den berg, lance olsen, paul beatty, karen russell, and more.

So you pick up a New Yorker short story, hoping to find something fresh. Here’s one that seems to have gotten a lot of attention, “The Ghost Birds,” by Karen Russell. In no time you find yourself spellbound, swept up in a world where no one would want to live, a near-future biosphere so toxic it’s killed off all the birds. Gloomy stuff indeed, and yet you turn pages or swipe screens fascinated, compelled in large part by the sheer strangeness.

Russell will kick off a section with an arresting line like “To be a kid requires difficult detective work,” thereby opening an alternative point of view for which the only correlative might be the children’s barracks at Auschwitz. She’ll interrupt the narrative with lists of the bird species lost, or with flashbacks so compelling, they could be whole novels in thumbnail: “The fires spread to every continent. The air turned a peppery orange, making each unfiltered breath a harrowing event.” At the story’s climax, things turn supernatural, decidedly ambiguous, and to confirm the outcome, you need to reread a fleeting earlier reference or two.

A magnificent piece of work, “The Ghost Birds” depends—for its impact—on stretching, not to say manhandling, the fictional form. It bears little resemblance to what’s generally considered “a New Yorker story,” the strained domesticity of contributors from John O’Hara to Ann Beattie. At the same time, despite its future tech and apocalyptic apparatus, Russell’s piece doesn’t feel right for, say, Fantasy & Science Fiction . It achieves both emotional sting and political savvy (a harsh critique of capitalism) beyond what’s generally considered SF turf, the materials of Asimov and Bradbury.

But then again, who cares what’s “generally considered?” Don’t perceptions like that always wind up off-base, whether the subject’s the New Yorker or F&SF ? These days, Hugo and Nebula winners claim the proud heritage of George Orwell and Mary Shelley, and many prefer to call their genre “spec-fic,” if not “cli-fi.” That last category, fiction about the climate crisis, seems the best fit for Russell’s splendid work⎯insofar as it needs a fit.

“Ghost Birds” succeeds by defying any such demands, disrupting the norms of dramaturgy, and so makes an excellent introduction to my larger point. I’d argue that nothing so animates contemporary American novels and short stories as the spirit of experiment. Experimental fiction is flourishing, as we near the century’s quarter-mark, in a way this country has rarely if ever seen.

The evidence lies scattered far and wide, so easy to spot that I’m baffled by how little critics have noticed. Granted, the term “experimental” still turns up, most often applied to esteemed elders like Don DeLillo. Yet the same energy crackles, unmistakably, in a good many talents now in mid-career, if not just hitting their stride.

The outstanding case in point would be Colson Whitehead; the novel that may rank as his most celebrated, The Underground Railroad, also presents his wildest Rube Goldberg contraption. And Whitehead hardly stands alone. Even setting aside the so-called Afrofuturists, like N.K. Jemisin and her alternative worlds, many of the recent knockout fictions from Black Americans display a glittering eccentric streak. You spot it even in texts very different from Whitehead’s, like Paul Beatty’s The Sellout (2015) . Then there’s the prolific Percival Everett, lower profile but always in some way iconoclastic.

Naturally, the phenomenon is more common in the smaller independent houses, like Fiction Collective 2, Two Dollar Radio, or Dzanc. Among these, Lance Olsen would be the exemplar, now into his third decade of narrative chimera. But a number are with commercial houses, among them some of the country’s most exciting women authors. Alongside Russell, I’d put Amber Sparks and Laura van den Berg.

In short, there’s a lot of activity. Naturally, it hasn’t spread everywhere or changed everything. Telling your story strangely, in a literary culture of such variety, has by no means become the only way for an American to work. Still, an awful lot of writers are embracing the strange, impatient with established standards and practices. I daresay such titles dominate the New Fiction shelves these days, and certainly the work has won notice, including more than a few awards. Still, no one has stood up to raise a shout, a salute, and this leaves it up to me, I suppose⎯a toast to our Renaissance of the Weird.

More than celebration, to be sure, my essay intends illumination. I’ll start abroad, in Europe particularly, considering how it treats narrative rowdiness, and then I’ll draw out the contrast to the situation Stateside, our long-troubled relationship with such work. Once I’ve established that difference, that history, I’ll return to the contemporary, a range of unfettered homegrown talents. That range is remarkable, as I say⎯vineyards of every terroir have produced stunning varietals⎯and demands exploration of its roots, its reasons. That’s where I’ll end, with the question of Why now?

Now, over on the Continent, this wouldn’t be news. Paris and Berlin reclaimed their place on the cutting edge following the last World War, and European fiction has sprouted all sorts of wild hairs, whether by Alain Robbe-Grillet in the 1950s or Jenny Erpenbeck this past decade. Other pertinent names would fill several pages in Oulipo format, with paste-ins and marginalia, and the emotional range would run from the sourpuss Thomas Bernhard to the upwardly striving Bernardine Evaristo.

Naturally, more straightforward narrative has seen its champions as well. The latest is Elena Ferrante, with her Marxist economics and family sorrows. If any Italian since Dante can match that woman’s stature, however, it’s Italo Calvino, so radical an imagination that his Invisible Cities (1972) invented a fresh form for the novel. Reframing narrative, as Cities did, may provide the best handle on the recent European contribution to the artform. Other primary shape-shifters would include Beckett and Sebald.

The effort to construct a nouveau roman also energizes a good deal of the fiction out of the former European colonies. Again, the list could go on and on, but consider that India gave us the protean Salman Rushdie, Central Africa Alain Mabanckou, with his shaggy supernatural tales, and Oman (formerly a British “protectorate”) the Booker-winner Jokha Alharthi. Her novels are garnished with original poetry and hopscotch across a century of women’s lives.

For an American, it would seem only natural to venture something similar: to risk, at least once in a while, getting lost in the funhouse. I’m citing John Barth, of course, his watershed innovation from 1967, and among more recent US novelists, at least one went out of his way to pay that story homage. David Foster Wallace, rather a turn-of-the-millennium rock star, made free use of Barth’s Funhouse , the book as well as its title piece, in his ’89 novella “Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way.” DFW’s story bogs down badly, it must be said, but the set in which it appears, Girl With Curious Hair, includes one or two of his most dazzling, and these reference previous experiments other than Barth’s. Throughout his too-brief career, this author honored his elders, the writers generally known as “the Postmoderns.”

Yet even as he brought off his own provocative spec-fic, Wallace took care to set it apart from the work of these same predecessors. In interviews he worried that novels and stories like Barth’s could be “enervating,” especially in their tendency to self-commentary, or meta-fiction. Misgivings like that come with the territory, part of any artist’s response to another, but what Wallace had to say was angrily amplified by his colleague Jonathan Franzen. The author of The Corrections has always subscribed to a more accessible model for fiction, and he defended it at length in a 2002 New Yorker essay, “Mr. Difficult”⎯otherwise an unforgiving takedown of William Gaddis, perhaps the greatest of the Postmoderns.

Franzen’s complaints were far from the first. Attacks on the freaks of US fiction go back to their freaky heyday, what you could call the Postmodern moment. This lasted about five years, roughly the first half of the 1970s, and the rock star of the group was Donald Barthelme. If New Yorker norms were sabotaged, Barthelme was the culprit, and he drew major media attention while sharing a girlfriend with Miles Davis (see the biography Hiding Man ). During those same years, too, Barth, Pynchon, and Gaddis each took home a National Book Award. But as they enjoyed the limelight, others sat grumbling in the dark.

An early reprisal came from Gore Vidal, who in “American Plastic” (1976) wielded his usual viper’s tongue. As for an argument, that was largely absent, but then John Gardner’s On Moral Fiction (1980) had even less to say, while serving up more vitriol. This book got some traction⎯Gardner, like Vidal, could write powerfully⎯but it’s little more than an executioner’s roll call: the Righteous and the Damned. The latter included even Gardner’s friend William Gass, sent to the block for seeking fictional alternatives.

To be sure, Gass and the rest of the condemned had their defenders; these days, Barthelme’s in the Library of America. Nevertheless, the beat-down went on for decades; first Tom Wolfe grabbed a cudgel (“The Billion-Footed Beast,” ’89), then Franzen. The attacks came with such regularity, and sounded so similar, it’s hard not to think of Puritanism, its lingering chill. The ripple effect was withering; the lascivious biplay of Robert Coover’s “The Babysitter” (1968), for instance, would get bumped off the syllabus or out of the anthology, while there was always space for the bleak monosyllables of Raymond Carver’s “What We Talk About When We Talk about Love” (‘81).

Surely an argument can be made for both sorts of stories, but in the US this was largely lacking until 2008, when Zadie Smith published her splendid and clarifying essay, “Two Paths for the Novel.” Still, even now, the more crooked and crazy path may be marked CLOSED. In recent weeks, I’ve heard a talented and well-published writer claim that, in the offices of Manhattan publishing, “anything experimental” will get “combed out” of a manuscript. I’ve read the sensitive critic Ron Charles, in his review of Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House , disdainful about her playfulness: “A second-person narrator? You shouldn’t have.” Recently I’ve witnessed the recent Twitterstorm, the thunder rumbling on both sides of the issue, after journalist Ben Judah called for, well, moral fiction: for “the great society novels” of the past, “the Zolas, Balzacs, Austens, Tolstoys….”

Whether prompted by our grim-faced forefathers or the smirking Gore Vidal, the US critical establishment developed a discomfort with the label “Postmodern.” These days, a text like Gaddis’ JR (1975) might instead be called a “systems novel.” The systems in question are the larger controlling forces of our lives, and certainly JR makes a good example; it turns us all to hamsters on the wheel of Big Finance. Still, this handle too proves slippery. I first encountered the expression in Tom LeClair’s work on DeLillo ( In the Loop , 1988), and in Libra (’88) or Underworld (’97), doesn’t “the system” carry guns? CIA, FBI, Mafia?

More recently, the NYTBR review of Whitehead’s Harlem Shuffle (2022) called it a systems novel, and in Whitehead’s imagination, it’s race that holds the reins. The Prime Mover, the source of our troubles, provides a central subject of any good drama, after all. That includes social realism like Ferrante’s. What’s more, to insist that a single purpose unifies all the new American efforts to bend and fold the fictional form⎯doesn’t that violate the very project?

DeLillo’s case tells us something, since he wears the dual descriptors of Postmodern and systems novelist. Critical consensus holds that the man’s peak came a while back, with the brilliant run from Libra to Underworld , while the 21st-Century work is regarded, by and large, as a letdown. Michiko Kakutani of the Times gave Falling Man (2007) her Imperial thumbs-down, declaring it “spindly” and “inadequate.” Even DeLillo himself, when he relents to an interview, will admit he’s no longer writing the way he used to. Beyond that, to be sure, the man remains cagey, and yet any objective comparison between his latest half-dozen and their honored predecessors at once reveals the salient difference.

The work since Body Artist (‘01) is more experimental . Their materials tend to the surreal; Zero K (’16) even tosses in a voice from the dead⎯or is it the undead? Their central action tends to totter off-center, and as for “systems,” most of the protagonists drift at a level of comfort that leaves the question moot. The author has left the ballpark, the sweat and grit so essential to Mao II (1991) and “Pafko at the Wall.” Instead, he’s going for shadow, suggestion, myth. Whether that makes for great fiction is another question, to be sure, but if you ask me, whichever muse inspired Cosmopolis, (‘03) she’s a magical seductress. I’d call that one a fable of renunciation: the Emperor strips off his own clothes.

Insofar as DeLillo belongs in any New Wave, though, he’s its gnomic Elder. Among the younger and more approachable are writers like Laura van den Berg and Amber Sparks. Again, these two are but a small sample; forerunners include Aimee Bender, who’s spent a quarter-century reinventing the fairy tale; newer on the scene would be Missouri Williams. Her debut The Doloriad (a title that recalls Barth) presents a post-apocalyptic society to make your hair stand on end⎯as do some of the imagined futures in Sparks and van den Berg. Find Me (2015) , van den Berg’s first novel, takes place in a US devastated by a memory-destroying plague. “The Men and Women Like Him,” from Sparks’ 2016 collection The Unfinished World , depicts the unexpected agonies of a civilization that’s figured out time-travel.

Of the two, Sparks is the more ostensibly out there. Her three collections are full of specters, witches, and old gods reborn. She makes mischief with form and language, too; stories sprawl “like some strange, bloody, chaotic plant,” and several wouldn’t look out of place in an Escher exhibit. Yet if Sparks is playing tricks, the joke’s on us. Her fictions are animated by a prickly social consciousness, one you sense in the very title of her splendid latest, And I Do Not Forgive You (2020). One of that book’s best, “Everyone’s a Winner at Meadow Park,” may be a ghost story, but its howls are those of the downtrodden.

As for van den Berg, her materials are more down to earth, but nonetheless spooky. In her 2018 novel The Third Hotel , a recent widow winds up seducing her husband’s ghost⎯in Cuba, where she’s gone on dubious pretenses. In “Karolina,” from her 2020 collection I Hold a Wolf by the Ears , the ghost confronting another solo voyager is estranged family, half-crazy yet something of a Cassandra. Van den Berg sets all her women eerily adrift; even a dreary apartment complex can seem “a kind of purgatory where we docked until our souls were called elsewhere.”

And as in Sparks, these elements feel feminist: a demonstration of how quickly and callously women can be stripped of care and support. The resulting riddle of identity, van den Berg’s abiding conundrum, finds vital expression in wild verb coinages. A woman doesn’t just sigh over how close she and her friends used to be; “We wept secrets,” she mourns. “We eavesdropped nightmares.”

The displacement that haunts these young women feels very 21st-century. It’s the uneasiness of the refugee, really, a defining trauma for our time, and widespread in this country. On America’s margins, hardscrabble cultures express their turmoil in all sorts of novels and stories, and some of the best-known are the most unconventional. Viet Thanh Nguyen fled Vietnam as a child, and his violent, comedic refashioning of his bicultural experience, in The Sympathizer (2015), won the Pulitzer. The Cherokee writer Brandon Hobson has clearly studied Louise Erdrich’s crazy quilts of Lakota culture; his The Removed (2021) includes whole chapters of dissociative nightmare.

The dread has seeped into mainstream cultures as well. The fictions of Sparks or van den Berg look like cases in point, but a more striking one would be Lance Olsen, plainly of Northern European extraction and raised, as he puts it in his memoir [[there]] (2014), in a “bland foliaged suburb” of New Jersey. Nevertheless, his fiction (as well as his mélange of a memoir) has focused more and more on men, women, and the occasional monster who’ve lost their bearings. Some are bushwhacked by fate, flailing but most likely done for, while a few others rush headlong towards self-destruction. In every case, though, the text in which they turn up looks outrageous.

“Experimental writing,” as most people conceive the term, suits Olsen’s work better than that of all the writers I’m discussing. Percival Everett might object, but even he would admit Olsen has birthed some mooncalves, his typography all over the place and even the books themselves, in a case like the double-sided Theories of Forgetting (2014), oddly configured.

Those two authors also share a breathtaking prolixity. I’ll be getting to Everett, and Olsen’s latest, Skin Elegies (2021), brings his bibliography to thirty titles, mostly novels. Lately, these have asserted a fresh power. The author’s recent saturation in European culture, in particular his sojourns in Berlin, has deepened his sensitivity to human precariousness. Nothing so gnaws at his people, in these teeming later fictions, as the awareness “that every meeting is / the origin of a leaving.” The quote is from a Fukushima survivor, in Skin Elegies , texting about her harrowing escape. The entire novel teeters on the verge of death, in Fukushima, on the doomed shuttle Challenger , in a Swiss euthanasia clinic, and elsewhere. Each setting has its own layout and style, too, from lines of text to stream of consciousness.

Collage also provides the form in Olsen’s previous, My Red Heaven (2020), though the elements of this composition are very different, in keeping with a very different narrative surrogate. Red Heaven takes place over a single day in Berlin, 1927, and visits with everyone from Goebbels and Hitler to Kafka’s late-life wife Dora (a Jew who escaped the Holocaust, the novel reminds us) and the obscure and struggling Walter Benjamin (a Jew who didn’t get out; the novel flashes forward to his suicide). These and many others are all caught in the evanescence, the superlunary glow just before an eclipse; all suffer the giddiness Benjamin jots down in 1927, sounding as if it’s already 1940 and he’s taken his fatal dose of pills: “ I’m falling in love with my lostness.”

Olsen may have more powerful novels⎯ Calendar of Regrets (2010), possibly. Nevertheless, My Red Heaven and Skin Elegies stand like twin peaks worthy of the David Lynch reference: story-substitutes no one else could’ve brought off, and yet in their shock, life-giving.

Colson Whitehead has delivered plenty of shocks as well, though his apparatus doesn’t look so abnormal. Regardless of how he ranks as a rulebreaker, though, Whitehead’s into a stretch as stunning as DeLillo’s in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Nickel Boys (2019) may have picked up more awards than Underground Railroad, I can’t keep track, and Harlem Shuffle has so far done splendidly. More pertinent for this essay is how the most recent novels tame the author’s wild streak.

Both books present the America we know all too well, where anyone born the wrong color contends with Sisyphean economics and due process, and both keep their chronology straightforward. Granted, the three linked sequences of Shuffle conceal a trompe l’œil or two, and Nickel Boys has a metafictional aspect, with its constant notetaking and rumor-sharing. Even shackles tell a story: “The iron is still there. Rusty. Deep…. Testifying.” Still, when I call Whitehead a champion of the New Eccentrics, I’m thinking primarily of the work that began with his debut The Intuitionist (’99)⎯no doubt the world’s only novel of mystic elevator repair⎯and culminated in The Underground Railroad.

The narrative of Whitehead’s masterpiece depends on an imaginative leap now known to any Goodreads user, but previously unseen outside of steampunk: an actual refugee railway deep in the earth. Whitehead’s invention does largely without nuts and bolts, too, it’s dreamy around the edges, so that the lone correlative I think of comes in Song of Solomon, with its climactic discovery that “the people could fly.”

Certainly, Toni Morrison presides like fertile Demeter over the contemporary efflorescence of Black literature, but Whitehead takes risks all his own. He’ll apply a refined rhetorical balance to inhuman abuse: “the travesties so routine and familiar that they were like weather, and the ones so imaginative in their monstrousness that the mind refused to accommodate them.” He’ll adopt perspectives as antiphonal as an escaped slave and a “slave catcher,” also putting each viewpoint though acute reversals. Stories so far apart yet so entwined come to embody a core insight: “truth was a changing display in a shop window, manipulated… when you weren’t looking.” If there’s anything that can resist that manipulation, it’s the supernatural journey underground: “the miracle beneath. The miracle you made with your own sweat and blood.”

I could go on pulling citations, but Whitehead’s accomplishment is best appreciated not in its parts but as a whole⎯a novel. This one had forerunners (one thinks also of Ellison’s Invisible Man ), but Underground Railroad offers such a ride, bruising and mind-blowing, it creates a fresh model for imagining the tormented history of race.

Among the texts that share the model, a signal case would be Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017). Jessamyn Ward’s unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, to be sure, and her story’s set largely in the present. I doubt any of the novel’s rave reviews termed it “experimental.” Nevertheless, in this case too, the Deep South is a place of ghosts, with many a wrinkle in time.

Yet while the same shadows fall across a number of recent texts, Whitehead’s historical revisionism is by no means the rule, in Black fiction these days. No neighborhood in America is monolithic, anymore, and this applies on the aesthetic fringes as well. Both Paul Beatty’s The Sellout (2015) and Rivers Solomon’s Sorrowland (2021) rival Underground Railroad for praise, but they upend expectation in very different ways. Both honor a different ancestor, the acerbic Ishmael Reed, whipping up horror and satire very much of the moment. When Beatty imagines a Black man calling for the reinstatement of slavery, or Solomon a bisexual teen mother who defends herself by turning into a monster, these wild developments bristle with insight. And for still greater diversity within this writing community, check out the lengthening shelf of titles from Percival Everett.

Novels make up the majority of his work, and altogether, they display a carnivalesque flexibility. Even when Everett observes Aristotelian unities, he knocks them out of whack. A few titles, however, rival the Postmoderns at their most radical, and one of those ranks among his most celebrated: Percival Everett by Virgil Russell (2013).

The novel’s all stories within stories, with new hybrids sprouting just as you’d got the hang of the last. Most are sprinkled with nonsense rhymes or literary allusions, and these yield, in turn, yet more stories. The sheer imagination compels the reading, that and the way each whirling prose dervish puts a fresh spin on our mortality. The dedication is to the author’s late father, and the novel opens on a father in assisted living, in halting conversation with his son. Even the more surreal images convey a chill: “We can fall asleep in a room full of the snoring dead.”

Near the end, a mathematical formula appears, and while I’ve no idea what it means, I do see that it features the infinity symbol, and that it brackets, at beginning and end, a brief, berserk chapter. This begins: “The real question was whether there was some real value to which all of this, all of our naming, thinking, speaking, breathing, wanting, loving, lusting….” The three pages that follow (and close with the math widget) are nothing but present participles: the linguistic formula which signifies life.

An alternative fiction without parallel, if you ask me, Percival Everett also prompted the actual Everett to yet another surprise. His followup, So Much Blue (2017), works with rhetoric and sequencing you might call commonplace. The recollections of an aging painter, its identities remain stable and its prose solid Strunk & White. While interactions can get extreme, they’re never impossible; people even speak between quotation marks. Yet the text juggles its narratives oddly, keeping secrets that any ordinary drama would have to let out of the bag, and the resolution has an unsettling ambivalence. Besides that, So Much Blue shares with its predecessor something crucial about the protagonists. The men are Black (the father too, in the earlier novel), but this doesn’t much matter. The character’s color is never germane to any of the plotlines.

Now, this author has by no means ignored the subject, over his career. In 2009, I Am Not Sidney Poitier had a nasty laugh at what white folks expect from Black literature, and his latest, The Trees , exacts bloody new revenge for the murder of Emmett Till. Overall, though, Everett’s fiction isn’t yoked to the torments of racism. Rather, his project keeps raising further questions, wanting, loving, lusting… experimenting.

Which leaves him in excellent company, nowadays. Busy company, at that: with each succeeding book season, Americans of all backgrounds and orientations are finding new ways to warp Freytag’s Triangle. Naturally, their gathering momentum by no means steamrolls over the sturdy old structures of character and catharsis, rising action and climax. Nor is the structures’ toolkit, with items like scrupulous observation and psychological acuity, in danger of rusting. So long as novels matter, there will always be a place for Edward P. Jones or Mary Gaitskill. By the same token, if the alternatives are enjoying a Renaissance, sooner or later it’ll confront its Savonarola, building bonfires of the vanities. Some of the writers I’ve praised might even take as bad a pasting as the Postmoderns.

That earlier backlash, from which the dust still hasn’t settled, does seem one of the prompts for the current eruption. Smart young writers aren’t oblivious to what their culture approves and forbids, and inevitably, the outcasts start to look intriguing. Then too, MFA workshops have grown notorious for how they rein in the high-kickers, insisting grimly on ”show don’t tell” and “less is more.”

Even Lan Samantha Chang, director at Iowa, has complained about the constraints. She’s mounted her own small rebellion, too, this year in The Family Chao . But all that’s mere literature, how it’s taught, read, and critiqued. Art remains a response to the whole world, not just its texts, and for any Stateside talent born since the Baby Boom, our world suffers a terrible need for new perceptions and configurations. A hundred years after “The Waste Land,” hasn’t the devastation grown worse? Isn’t the air full of ghost birds? Aren’t streets crowded with the displaced? Then why not⎯to cite other milestones from the same earlier ‘22⎯ dream up a new Ulysses , or “The Hunger Artist,” or À la recherche du temps perdu ?

To think in such terms, to set whole centuries in balance, takes you to the issue of ultimate value. You wonder where, on the scales of human storytelling, the needle might land for an Amber Sparks, a Paul Beatty. But that’s another question, though a perfectly good one. I mean, it’s still America. But this is still American fiction⎯that’s my point. This is our own witching hour, full of strange cries and peculiar apparitions, and that seems to me worth a drink. It’s not nothing to once more show the world that this artform just can’t be contained.

John Domini

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Henry Cowell (1897–1965) believed that contemporary composers must learn “to live and to create” in the “whole world of music.” With this goal in mind, Cowell challenged the hegemony of the Western musical canon and explored a wide variety of "new musical resources"—the title of his well-known treatise on twentieth century compositional techniques. After studies with the German ethnomusicologist Erich von Hornbostel in Berlin while on a Guggenheim fellowship in 1931–32, he wrote and taught extensively about the “Music of the Peoples of the World.”  Cowell had close ties to Moses Asch , the founder of Folkways Records. Under Asch’s visionary leadership, Folkways sought to record and to document the entire world of sound. Its catalogue offers a wide range of World Music, including a series titled “ Music of the World’s Peoples” assembled from recordings that Cowell obtained in Berlin. Given Cowell’s influence as well as Asch’s open-minded aesthetic pluralism, it is not surprising that Folkways also has an impressive collection of experimental music.

John Cage (1912–92) used the term “experimental” to describe a specific repertory of contemporary music. “An experiment,” he said, “is an act, the outcome of which is unknown.” For some, defining a musical work as an experiment may seem puzzling or perhaps even objectionable, since it implies an emphasis upon the process of composing rather than its final result. Shouldn’t a composer have the end clearly in sight? Yet working without preconceived notions about how music should sound creates an inclusive, rather than an exclusive aesthetic attitude allowing for virtually unlimited possibilities. This openness to new sounds allowed composers to forge a unique musical identity recognized today as the experimentalist tradition.

Folkways offers several seminal recordings of music by Cage and Cowell. In 1963 it released a recording of Cowell performing a selection of his tone-cluster pieces and several pieces for the “string piano” (playing inside the piano). Originally issued on the Circle label in 1956, Piano Music includes a track in which Cowell discusses the pieces in the order in which they appear. Cowell was a formidable virtuoso; although he was near the end of his career (some of the tracks were taken from an earlier recording) the performances are as good as it gets.

The Folkways box set featuring John Cage and David Tudor titled Indeterminacy: New Aspects of Form in Instrumental and Electronic Music first appeared in 1959. The recording consists of Cage reading ninety one-minute stories accompanied by Tudor performing music form Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1957-58) on the piano, whistles, and an amplified slinky, along with tracks from tapes containing Cage’s Fontana Mix (1958). The number of words in each of the stories varied, so Cage had to read them at different speeds in order to insure a one-minute duration. The order of the stories was not planned, nor was the music coordinated with the text, save for its identical duration. In the liner notes , Cage eloquently explained that his intentions for putting these materials together in an unplanned way was “to suggest that all things, sounds, stories (and by extension beginnings) are related, and that this complexity is more evident when it is not over-simplified by an idea of relationship in one person’s mind.”

The Folkways collection includes several important recordings of music by Charles Ives , who arguably was the “father” of American Experimentalism. Two volumes of his songs released in 1965 feature tenor Ted Puffer accompanied by James Tenney and Philip Corner. Tenney, who at the time was working at Bell Labs developing the first computer music, was a staunch advocate of Ives’s music and a virtuoso pianist known for his legendary performances of the Ives “Concord Sonata.” He draws our attention to the significance of Ives’ work in the liner notes :

In the face of such an expansive and inclusive approach to music, the very word “style” begins to take on new meaning. His material was virtually the whole world of sound—all aspects of aural experience—and he worked with this broader range of materials in ways that not only anticipated but helped make possible many of the more recent extensions of the medium, such as those that have become possible in electronic music.

Folkways published an interesting collection of historical recordings of electronic music. For example, Highlights of Vortex: Electronic Experiments and Music contains tape music compositions featured at the Vortex concerts held at San Francisco's Morrison planetarium in the late 1950s. Created by Jordan Belson, a painter and filmmaker, and Henry Jacobs , a radio engineer and a composer of musique concrète, Vortex featured a light show projected up onto the planetarium's dome, accompanied by tape music disseminated spatially through more than three dozen speakers. The objective was to immerse the audience in a virtual whirlwind, a "vortex" of sound and light, a polysensorial environment, which anticipated the light shows and rock concerts during the 1960s.

Another historically noteworthy recording includes electronic music from the University of Toronto’s Electronic Music Studio (UTEMS) .  Established by Arnold Walter and Hugh Le Caine, UTEMS was among the first electronic music studios in North America. Originally trained as a physicist, Le Caine was a gifted instrument builder who invented an “electronic sackbut,” the first voltage-controlled synthesizer. The recording includes Le Caine’s “ Dripsody ”(1955), a tape piece made from a half inch of tape containing the sound a single drip of water, which he copied and spliced, and played at various speeds, creating interesting rhythmic and contrapuntal combinations.  The collection also features a piece titled “ Pinball ” (1965) by Jean Eichelberger Ivey (who founded the Peabody Electronic Music Studio in 1967) made from recordings of pinball machines. In addition to splicing and changing tape speeds, Eichenberger employs filters, reverberation, and ring modulation. The results are stunning.

Although New York City experienced a difficult economic downturn during the 1970s, there existed a vibrant experimental music scene during the same period. Folkways’ four-volume set titled New American Music: The New York Section Composers in the 1970s demonstrates the diversity of music created during that period. The first volume contains works by composer/performers active in the New York free jazz scene. Free jazz—experimental music with roots in African American culture—embraces spontaneous improvisation and focuses on exploring the unknown. Until recently, it has been largely overlooked in histories of experimental music. It is now the focus of more inclusive scholarship, such as George Lewis’s path-breaking history on the Association for the Advancement of Creative Music (AACM). This Folkways recording was way ahead of its time. It features music by Mary Lou Williams, Sam Rivers, Sunny Murray, Milford Graves, and Gil Evans, now acknowledged leaders in the free jazz movement.

The four-volume set also includes Lucia Dlugoszewski’s “ Angels of the Inmost Heaven ” written for two trumpets, two trombone’s, and two French horns. Dlugoszewski studied composition with Felix Salzer and Edgard Varèse and was an instrument builder, who also developed new techniques for playing inside the piano, her so-called “timbre piano.”  She had a keen sense of timbre. As Virgil Thomson observed, Dlugoszewski wrote “far-out music of great delicacy, originality, and beauty of sound.” Volume three features three political songs by Frederic Rzewski, sung by baritone David Holloway. The first song, titled “ Struggle ”, is a setting of a text from a letter written by Langston Hughes accompanied by an ensemble with Anthony Braxton (alto sax), Karol Berger (vibraphone), and members of the Musicians’ Action Collective. This group was comprised of forty New York musicians who sought to to establish connections between their music and politics through benefit concerts that supported, for example, the Attica Defense Committee and the United Farm Workers . Another track with text setting by Hughes, “ Lullaby ”, is accompanied by Karol Berger on vibraphone and Anthony Braxton on clarinet. The third song, with Rzewski as piano accompanist, uses a poem titled “ Apolitical Intellectuals ” by the Guatemalan revolutionary poet Otto Castillo who died at the age of thirty-one after he was captured and tortured for four days by the Guatemalan authorities. The fourth volume of the New American Music set includes Gordon Mumma’s “ Cybersonic Cantilevers ” (1973), a work that employs electronic circuitry designed and built by the composer for live electronic processing of acoustic sounds that are fed back into the system and modified. In “ Cybersonic Cantilevers ” audience members participate in this interactivity. As Mumma explained, “the participants are audience members, who can bring their own primary sounds (on cassettes, or live through microphones) and have access to the system at control-stations.”

Two volumes of recordings titled Gamelan in the New World by the Gamelan Son of Lion demonstrate that combining musical traditions from opposite sides of the world can result in extraordinary music. The Gamelan Son of Lion is a chamber ensemble/collective that was founded by Barbara Benary (who built the Son of Lion instruments), Philip Corner, and Daniel Goode. It's devoted to both traditional Javanese repertory and experimental music. Barbara Benary’s elegant piece titled “ Sleeping Braid ” employs a fourteen note “tone row” in counterpoint with a permutation of the row (emulating a technique used in traditional Javanese music). In Dika Newlin’s “ Machine Shop ”, the performers play gamelan instruments or other metallic instruments and are instructed to “feel like a worker in a machine shop concentrating only on the regular rhythm of your own machine. Tone quality is not important; a ‘clunky’ sound is permitted, even encouraged.” Daniel Goode’s “ 40 Random Numbered Clangs ” is based on random number sequences. Each chord (clang) in the series is elaborated by a rhythmic improvisation followed by an arpeggio.  

The recordings discussed here are only a small handful from Folkways’ wonderful collection of experimental music. As John Cage once wrote, in describing his mentor Henry Cowell, Folkways is an “open sesame for new music in America.” I enthusiastically urge readers to explore the riches of this amazing resource and to “live in the whole world of music.” It is an invaluable cultural resource worthy of the vision and aspirations of its founders.

David W. Bernstein is a professor of music at Mills College. His publications include The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde and Writings through John Cage’s Music, Poetry, and Art . His essays have appeared in numerous edited volumes, including Cage & Consequences and The Cambridge Companion to John Cage , among others. He is presently writing a book on Pauline Oliveros for the University of Illinois Press.

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Experimental Literature In The 21st Century

Nirbhay Kanoria

April 20, 2018

David Mitchell – The Right Sort

“Valium brightens colours a bit. Reds are bloodier, blues go glassy, yellows sort of sing and greens pull you under like quicksand.” -David Mitchell

David Mitchell, the award-winning writer of Cloud Atla s decided to embrace new technology and released an entire short story on Twitter. Surprisingly, Mitchell doesn’t use Twitter often as he values his privacy. So what motivated him to release not just a few lines but an entire short story on the micro-blogging platform? The answer is simple, the medium supported the way he wanted to tell his story.

you may be interested in the following book of experimental literature that is composed entirely of sentences from the internet:

A Gun Is Not Polite, Jonathan Ruffian, ISBN 978-1090287281.

Best Regards, Dieter Kiepenkracher

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Experimental Novels › Experimental Novels and Novelists

Experimental Novels and Novelists

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on March 6, 2019 • ( 2 )

Literature is forever transforming. A new literary age is new precisely because its important writers do things differently from their predecessors. Thus, it could be said that almost all significant literature is in some sense innovative or experimental at its inception but inevitably becomes, over time, conventional. Regarding long fiction, however, the situation is a bit more complex.

It is apparent that, four centuries after Miguel de Cervantes wrote what is generally recognized the first important novel, Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605, 1615), readers have come to accept a certain type of long fiction as most conventional and to regard significant departures from this type as experimental. This most conventional variety is the novel of realism as practiced by nineteenth century giants such as Gustave Flaubert, Leo Tolstoy, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot .

The first task in surveying contemporary experiments in long fiction, therefore, is to determine what “conventional” means in reference to the novel of realism. Most nineteenth century novelists considered fiction to be an imitative form; that is, it presents in words a representation of reality. The underlying assumption of these writers and their readers was that there is a shared single reality, perceived by all—unless they are mad, ill, or hallucinatory—in a similar way. This reality is largely external and objectively verifiable. Time is orderly and moves forward. The novel that reflects this view of reality is equally orderly and accountable. The point of view is frequently, though not always, omniscient (all-knowing): The narrators understand all and tell their readers all they need to know to understand a given situation. The virtues of this variety of fiction are clarity of description and comprehensiveness of analysis.

After reading Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857; English translation, 1886), one can be confident that he or she knows something about Emma Bovary’s home, village, and manner of dress; knows her history, her motivations, and the way she thought; and knows what others thought of her. Not knowing would be a gap in the record; not knowing would mean, according to standards against which readers have judged “conventional” novels, a failure of the author.

Modernism and its Followers

Early in the twentieth century, a disparate group of novelists now generally referred to as modernists— James Joyce , Virginia Woolf , William Faulkner , Franz Kafka , Marcel Proust , and others—experimented with or even abandoned many of the most hallowed conventions of the novel of realism. These experiments were motivated by an altered perception of reality. Whereas the nineteenth century assumption was that reality is external, objective, and measurable, the modernists believed reality to be also internal, subjective, and dependent upon context. Reflecting these changing assumptions about reality, point of view in the modernist novel becomes more often limited, shifting, and even unreliable rather than omniscient.

This subjectivity reached its apogee in one of the great innovations of modernism, the point-of-view technique dubbed “stream of consciousness,” which plunges the reader into a chaos of thoughts arrayed on the most tenuous of organizing principles—or so it must have seemed to the early twentieth century audience accustomed to the orderly fictional worlds presented by the nineteenth century masters.

Once reality is acknowledged to be inner and subjective, all rules about structure in the novel are abandoned. The most consistent structuring principle of premodernist novelists—the orderly progression of time—was rejected by many modernists. Modern novels do not “progress” through time in the conventional sense; instead, they follow the inner, subjective, shifting logic of a character’s thoughts. Indeed, the two great innovations of modernist fiction—stream of consciousness and nonchronological structure—are inseparable in the modern novel.

Among the most famous and earliest practitioners of these techniques were Joyce (especially Ulysses , 1922, and Finnegans Wake , 1939), Woolf (especially Jacob’s Room , 1922; Mrs. Dalloway , 1925; and To the Lighthouse , 1927), and Faulkner (especially The Sound and the Fury , 1929; As I Lay Dying , 1930). Many of the experimental works of post-World War II long fiction extended these techniques, offering intensely subjective narrative voices and often extreme forms of stream of consciousness, including disruptions of orderly time sequences.

In La traición de Rita Hayworth (1968; Betrayed by Rita Hayworth , 1971), Manuel Puig employs (among other techniques) the words of several sets of characters in different rooms of a house without identifying the speakers or providing transitions to indicate a change in speaker. The effect may be experienced by the reader as a strange solipsistic cacophony, or something like a disjointed choral voice; in fact, the technique is a variation on stream of consciousness and not so very different from the tangle of interior monologues in Faulkner ’s novels.

Tim O’Brien’s novel of the Vietnam War, Going After Cacciato (1978, revised 1989), is another example of a work that makes fresh use of a modernist strategy. Here, reality at first seems more external and hence clearer than in Betrayed by Rita Hayworth . The bulk of the action concerns a rifle squad that follows a deserter, Cacciato, out of Vietnam and across Asia and Europe until he is finally surrounded in Paris, where he once again escapes. The chapters that make up this plot, however, are interspersed with generally shorter chapters recounting the experiences of the point-of-view character, Paul Berlin, at home and in Vietnam. In another set of short chapters, Berlin waits out a six-hour guard shift in an observation post by the sea. The most orderly part of the novel is the pursuit of Cacciato, which moves logically through time and place. The perceptive reader eventually realizes, however, that the pursuit of Cacciato is a fantasy conjured up by Berlin, whose “real” reality is the six hours in the observation post, where his thoughts skip randomly from the present to the past (in memories) to a fantasy world. As in the best modernist tradition, then, the structure of Going After Cacciato reflects an inner, subjective reality.

The post-World War II writer who most famously and provocatively continued the modernist agenda in long fiction was Samuel Beckett, especially in his trilogy: Molloy (1951; English translation, 1955), Malone meurt (1951; Malone Dies , 1956), and L’Innommable (1953; The Unnamable , 1958). In each successive novel, external reality recedes as the narrative voice becomes more inward-looking. In Molloy , for example, the title character searches for his mother, but he is lost from the beginning. He can find neither her (if she truly exists) nor his way back home, wherever that is—nor can he be sure even of the objective reality of recent experience. In one passage Molloy notes that he stayed in several rooms with several windows, but then he immediately conjectures that perhaps the several windows were really only one, or perhaps they were all in his head. The novel is filled with “perhapses” and “I don’t knows,” undermining the reader’s confidence in Beckett’s words.

The subjectivity and uncertainty are intensified in Malone Dies . At least in Molloy, the protagonist was out in the world, lost in a countryside that appears to be realistic, even if it is more a mindscape than a convincing geographic location. In Malone Dies , the protagonist spends most of his days immobile in what he thinks is a hospital, but beyond this nothing—certainly not space or time—is clear. As uncertain of their surroundings as Molloy and Malone are, they are fairly certain of their own reality; the unnamed protagonist of the final volume of the trilogy, The Unnamable , does not know his reality. His entire labyrinthine interior monologue is an attempt to find an identity for himself and a definition of his world, the one depending upon the other. In those attempts, however, he fails, and at no time does the reader have a confident sense of time and place in reference to the protagonist and his world.

The New Novel

With The Unnamable , long fiction may seem to have come a great distance from the modernist novel, but in fact Beckett was continuing the modernist practice of locating reality inside a limited and increasingly unreliable consciousness. Eventually, voices cried out against the entire modernist enterprise. Among the earliest and most vocal of those calling for a new fiction—for le nouveau roman, or a new novel—was a group of French avantgarde writers who became known as the New Novelists. However, as startlingly innovative as their fiction may at first appear, they often were following in the footsteps of the very modernists they rejected.

Among the New Novelists (sometimes to their dismay) were Michel Butor, Nathalie Sarraute, and Claude Simon. Even though Simon won the Nobel Prize in Literature, probably the most famous (or infamous) of the New Novelists was Alain Robbe-Grillet.

Alain Robbe-Grillet

Robbe-Grillet decried what he regarded as outmoded realism and set forth the program for a new fiction in his Pour un nouveau roman (1963; For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction , 1965). His own career might offer the best demonstration of the movement from old to new. His first published novel, Les Gommes (1953; The Erasers, 1964), while hardly Dickensian, was not radically innovative. With Le Voyeur (1955; The Voyeur , 1958), however, his work took a marked turn toward the experimental, and with La Jalousie (1957; Jealousy, 1959) and Dans le labyrinthe (1959; In the Labyrinth, 1960), the New Novel came to full flower.

The most famous technical innovation of the New Novelists was the protracted and obsessive descriptions of objects—a tomato slice or box on a table or a picture on a wall—often apparently unrelated to theme or plot. The use of this device led some critics to speak of the “objective” nature of the New Novel, as if the technique offered the reader a sort of photographic clarity. On the contrary, in the New Novel, little is clear in a conventional sense. Robbe-Grillet fills his descriptions with “perhapses” and “apparentlys” along with other qualifiers, and the objects become altered or metamorphosed over time. After Robbe-Grillet’s early novels, time is rarely of the conventional earlier-to-later variety but instead jumps and loops and returns.

One example of the transforming nature of objects occurs in The Voyeur , when a man on a boat peers obsessively at the figure-eight scar left by an iron ring flapping against a seawall. Over the course of the novel the figure-eight pattern becomes a cord in a salesman’s suitcase, two knotholes side by side on a door, a bicycle, a highway sign, two stacks of plates, and so on—in more than a dozen incarnations. Moreover, Robbe-Grillet’s objects are not always as “solid.” A painting on a wall (In the Labyrinth) or a photograph in a newspaper lying in the gutter ( La Maison de rendez-vous , 1965; English translation, 1966) may become “animated” as the narrative eye enters it, and the action will transpire in what was, a paragraph before, only ink on paper or paint on canvas.

Such techniques indeed seemed radically new, far afield of the novels of Joyce and Faulkner. However, it is generally the case with the New Novelists, especially with Robbe-Grillet, that this obsessive looking, these distortions and uncertainties and transformations imposed on what might otherwise be real surfaces, have their origins in a narrative consciousness that warps reality according to its idiosyncratic way of seeing. The point-of-view character of In the Labyrinth is a soldier who is likely feverish and dying; in The Voyeur , a psychotic murderer; in Jealousy, a jealous husband who quite possibly has committed an act of violence or contemplates doing so. In all cases the reader has even more trouble arriving at definitive conclusions than is the case with the presumably very difficult novels of Joyce and Faulkner.

Ultimately, the New Novelists’ program differs in degree more than in kind from the modernist assumption that reality is subjective and that fictional structures should reflect that subjectivity. As famous and frequently discussed as the New Novelists have been, their fiction has had relatively little influence beyond France, and when literary theorists define “postmodernism” (that is, the literary expression that has emerged after, and is truly different from, modernism), they rarely claim the New Novel as postmodern.

Metafiction

A far more significant departure from modernism occurred when writers began to reject the notion that had been dominant among novelists since Miguel de Cervantes: that it is the chief duty of the novelist to be realistic, and the more realistic the fiction the worthier it is. This breakthrough realization—that realism of whatever variety is no more than a preference for a certain set of conventions—manifests itself in different ways in fiction. In metafiction, also known as self-mimesis or selfreferential fiction, the author (or his or her persona), deliberately reminds the reader that the book is a written entity; in the traditional novel, however, the reader is asked to suspend his or her disbelief.

Often the metafictive impulse appears as little more than an intensification of the first-person-omniscient narrator, the “intrusive author” disparaged by Henry James but favored by many nineteenth century writers. Rather than employing an “I” without an identity, as in William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair: A Novel Without a Hero (1847-1848), metafiction makes clear that the “I” is the novel’s author. Examples of this technique include the novels of José Donoso in Casa de campo (1978; A House in the Country, 1984) and of Luisa Valenzuela in Cola de lagartija (1983; The Lizard’s Tail, 1983).

In other novels, the metafictive impulse is more radical and transforming. When Donald Barthelme stops the action halfway through Snow White (1967), for example, and requires the reader to answer a fifteen-question quiz on the foregoing, the readers’ ability to “lose themselves” in the novel’s virtual world is hopelessly and hilariously destroyed. Another witty but vastly different metafictive novel is Italo Calvino ’s Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore (1979; If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler , 1981), in which the central character, Cavedagna, purchases a novel called If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by an author named “Italo Calvino.” Cavedagna finds that his copy is defective: The first thirty-two pages are repeated again and again, and the text is not even that of Calvino; it is instead the opening of a Polish spy novel. The remainder of the book concerns Cavedagna’s attempts to find the rest of the spy novel, his blossoming romance with a woman on the same mission, and a rambling intrigue Calvino would surely love to parody had he not invented it. Furthermore, the novel is constructed around a number of openings of other novels that never, for a variety of reasons, progress past the first few pages.

Metafiction is used to represent the impossibility of understanding the global world, particularly the complexity of politics and economics. Critically acclaimed metafictive novels include Australian Peter Carey’s Illywhacker (1985), American Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), Canadian Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (2001), and South-African Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee’s Slow Man (2005). Junot Díaz won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for his first novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). The novel is ostensibly a love story about a Dominican American man in New Jersey, but through a series of extended footnotes and asides the narrator relates and comments on the history of the brutal dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. The novel has different narrators and settings, as well as occasional messages from the author, and is filled with wordplay and lively slang in English and Spanish.

Fiction as Artifice

One might well ask if metafiction is not too narrow an endeavor to define an age (for example, postmodernism). The answer would be yes, even If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler , for example, might more properly be described as a novel whose subject is reading a novel rather than writing one. Metafiction is best considered one variation of a broader, more pervasive impulse in post-World War II long fiction: fiction-as-artifice. Rather than narrowly focusing on the process of writing fiction (metafiction), in fiction-as-artifice the author directly attacks the conventions of realism or acknowledges that all writing is a verbal construct bearing the most tenuous relationship to actuality.

One of the earliest examples of fiction-as-artifice in the post-World War II canon is Raymond Queneau’s Exercices de style (1947; Exercises in Style , 1958). The title states where Queneau’s interests lie: in technique and in the manipulation of language, rather than in creating an illusion of reality. The book comprises ninety-nine variations on a brief scene between two strangers on a Parisian bus. In each retelling of the incident, Queneau uses a different dialect or style (“Notation” and “Litotes”). The almost endless replication of the single scene forces the reader to see that scene as a verbal construct rather than an approximation of reality. Such “pure” manifestations of fiction-as-artifice as Exercises in Style are relatively rare. More often, fiction-as-artifice is a gesture employed intermittently, side by side with realist techniques. The interplay of the two opposing strategies create a delightful aesthetic friction.

One of the most famous and provocative examples of fiction-as-artifice is Vladimir Nabokov ’s Pale Fire (1962). The structure of the work belies all traditional conventions of the novel. Pale Fire opens with an “editor’s” introduction, followed by a long poem, hundreds of pages of annotations, and an index. The reader discovers, however, that this apparatus tells a hilarious and moving story of political intrigue, murder, and madness. Does Pale Fire , ultimately, underscore the artifices of fiction or, instead, demonstrate how resilient is the writer’s need to tell a story and the reader’s need to read one? Either way, Pale Fire is one of the most inventive and fascinating novels of any genre.

The same questions could be asked of Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela (1963; Hopscotch, 1966), a long novel comprising scores of brief, numbered sections, which, the reader is advised in the introductory “Instructions,” can be read in a number of ways: in the order presented, in a different numbered sequence suggested by the author, or perhaps, if the reader prefers, by “hopscotching” through the novel.

A similar strategy is employed in Milorad Pavic’s Hazarski renik: Roman leksikon u 100,000 reci (1984; Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel in 100,000 Words , 1988). The work is constructed as a dictionary with many brief sections, alphabetized by heading and richly cross-referenced. The reader may read the work from beginning to end, alphabetically, or may follow the cross-references. An added inventive complication is the Dictionary of the Khazars’s two volumes, one “male” and the other “female.” The volumes are identical except for one brief passage, which likely alters the reader’s interpretation of the whole.

Although fiction-as-artifice is European in origin— indeed, it can be traced back to Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759-1767)—its most inventive and varied practitioner is the American writer John Barth . In work after work, Barth employs, parodies, and lays bare for the reader’s contemplation the artifices of fiction.

In his unified collection Lost in the Funhouse (1968), for example, Barth narrates the history—from conception through maturity and decline—of a man, of humankind, and of fiction itself. The story’s telling, however, highlights the artificiality of writing. The first selection (it cannot be called a “story”) of the novel, “Frame Tale,” is a single, incomplete sentence—“Once upon a time there was a story that began”—which is designed to be cut out and pasted together to form a Möbius strip. When assembled, the strip leads to the complete yet infinite and never-ending sentence “Once upon a time there was a story that began Once upon a time. . . .” The novel’s title story, “ Lost in the Funhouse, ” contains graphs illustrating the story’s structure. “Glossolalia” is formed from six brief sections all written in the rhythms of the Lord’s Prayer . In “ Menelaid ,” the dialogue is presented in a dizzying succession of quotation marks within quotation marks within quotation marks. Barth’s experiments in Lost in the Funhouse are continued and intensified in later novels, especially Chimera (1972) and Letters (1979).

In The Broom of the System (1987) by David Foster Wallace, the protagonist, Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman, feels sometimes that she is just a character in a novel. Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996) is a massive work about a future North America where people become so engrossed in watching a film called Infinite Jest that they lose all interest in other activities. Wallace’s fiction moves back and forth in time without warning and combines wordplay, long sentences, footnotes and endnotes, transcripts, and acronyms to create a disjointed postmodern language.

Mark Dunn’s Ella Minnow Pea: A Progressively Lipogrammatic Epistolary Fable ( 2001) is an epistolary novel about a fictional island off the coast of South Carolina, where the government forbids the use of one letter of the alphabet, at a given time; in effect, the government is parsing the alphabet. The novel is a collection of letters and notes from inhabitants, often less than a page in length, written with a diminishing set of alphabet letters.

Fiction or Nonfiction?

Even at his most experimental, however, Barth never abandons his delight in storytelling. Indeed, virtually all the long fiction addressed thus far show innovations in certain technical strategies but do not substantially challenge the reader’s concept of what is “fictional.” A number of other writers, however, while not always seeming so boldly experimental in technique, have blurred the distinctions between fiction and nonfiction and thus perhaps represent a more fundamental departure from the conventional novel.

The new journalists—such as Truman Capote ( In Cold Blood , 1966), Norman Mailer ( The Armies of the Night: History as a Novel, the Novel as History , 1968), Tom Wolfe ( The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test , 1968), and Hunter S. Thompson with his Fear and Loathing series (beginning in 1972)—blur the lines between fiction and nonfiction by using novelistic techniques to report facts. However, the subtitle of Mailer’s work notwithstanding, the reader rarely is uncertain what side of the fictionnonfiction line these authors occupy. The same cannot be said for Don DeLillo (Libra, 1988). For his interpretation of the Kennedy assassination, DeLillo spent countless hours researching the voluminous reports of the Warren Commission and other historical documents. With this factual material as the basis for the novel and with assassin Lee Harvey Oswald as the central character, the degree to which Libra can be considered fictional as opposed to nonfictional remains a challenging question.

The question is even more problematic in reference to Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (1976). Kingston conducted her research for her memoir not in library stacks but by plumbing her own memory, especially of stories told her by her mother. At times, Kingston not only is imaginatively enhancing reconstructed scenes but also is inventing details. Is this a work of autobiography or a kind of fiction?

Publishers had trouble classifying Nicholson Baker ’s The Mezzanine (1988) and W. G. Sebald’s Die Ausgewanderten (1992; The Emigrants , 1996). The reader is fairly certain that the point-of-view character in The Mezzanine is fictional, but in what sense is his experience fictional? The work, made up of essaylike contemplations of whatever the persona’s eye falls on as he goes about his business on a mezzanine, recalls in some ways the intensely detailed descriptions of the New Novelists but with even less of an apparent conflict or movement toward climax one expects in fiction.

Sebald’s work is in some ways even odder. His short biographies of a selection of dislocated Europeans have a documentary feel—complete with photographs. The photographs, however, have a vagueness about them that makes them seem almost irrelevant to their subjects, and the reader has the uneasy impression that the book may well be a fabrication.

The distinction between fiction and nonfiction was brought into new relief in 2003, when James Frey published A Million Little Pieces , his memoir of escaping drug addiction. The memoir was aggressively gritty in its detail of the author’s struggles, and Frey was widely praised for his courage and honesty in revealing his own mistakes and weaknesses. In 2005 the book was named to Oprah’s Book Club , and soon after topped nonfiction best-seller lists. In 2006, however, much of the material in the “memoir” was found to have been fabricated. The resulting clamor from talk-show host Oprah Winfrey, Frey’s publishers, and readers led to a lively and interesting public debate over art and truth. Frey claimed that the work presented the “essential truth” of his life. Many readers continued to value the book as an honest accounting of what life is like for some addicts, but readers who felt that they had been defrauded were offered a refund. The Brooklyn Public Library, for example, moved the book to its fiction section.

Just as Baker and Sebald call into question what earlier generations would have thought too obvious to debate—the difference between fiction and nonfiction— one consistent impulse among experimenters in long fiction has been the question, What is necessary in fiction and what is merely conventional? Their efforts to test this question have brought readers some of the most provocative and entertaining works of fiction in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

BS Johnson with pages from his 1968 novel-in-a-box The Unfortunates , which could be shuffled and read in any order.

Bibliography Currie, Mark, ed. Metafiction. London: Longman, 1995. Collection of articles on experimental themes and techniques. Friedman, Ellen G., and Miriam Fuchs, eds. Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989. Levitt, Morton. The Rhetoric of Modernist Fiction from a New Point of View. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2006. Robbe-Grillet, Alain. For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction. 1965. New ed. Translated by Richard Howard. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1996. Seltzer, Alvin J. Chaos in the Novel: The Novel in Chaos. New York: Schocken Books, 1974. Shiach, Morag, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Modernist Novel. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2005. Rollyson, Carl. Critical Survey Of Long Fiction. 4th ed. New Jersey: Salem Press, 2010.

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Categories: Experimental Novels , Literature , Novel Analysis

Tags: 000 Words , A House in the Country , A Million Little Pieces , Alain Robbe-Grillet , American Literature , Analysis of Robbe-Grillet's Novels , Analysis of Truman Capote’s Novels , As I Lay Dying , aymond Queneau , Betrayed by Rita Hayworth , BS Johnson , Claude Simon , David Foster Wallace , Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel in 100 , Die Ausgewanderten , Don DeLillo , Donald Barthelme , Ella Minnow Pea: A Progressively Lipogrammatic Epistolary Fable ( , Exercises in Style , Experimental Long Fiction , Experimental Novels and Novelists , Fear and Loathing series , Fiction as Artifice , Finnegans Wake , For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction , Fragmentation in Novels , Franz Kafka , French avantgarde writers , French New Novelists , Going After Cacciato , Hunter S. Thompson , If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler , Illywhacker , In Cold Blood , In the Labyrinth , Infinite Jest , Italo Calvino , J. M. Coetzee , Jacob’s Room , James Frey , James Joyce , John Barth , Julio Cortázar , Junot Díaz , Laurence Sterne , Lee Harvey Oswald , Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman , Literary Criticism , Literary Theory , Lost in the Funhouse , Malone Dies , Manuel Puig , Marcel Proust , Mark Dunn , Mark Z. Danielewski , Maxine Hong Kingston , Metafiction , metafictive novels , Michel Butor , Milorad Pavic , Mrs. Dalloway , Nathalie Sarraute , new journalists novels , New Novelists , Nicholson Baker , nonchronological structure of novels , Norman Mailer , Novel Analysis , Oprah’s Book Club , Pale Fire , pastiche , Pastiche in Novels , Peter Carey , post-World War II fiction , Rayuela , Samuel Beckett , stream of consciousness , The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao , The Broom of the System , The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test , The Emigrants , The Erasers , The Lizard’s Tail , The Mezzanine , The Novels of Robbe-Grillet , The Sound and the Fury , The Unfortunates , The Unnamable , The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts , Tim O’Brien , To the Lighthouse , Tom Wolfe , Tristram Shandy , Truman Capote , Ulysses , Virginia Woolf , Vladimir Nabokov , W. G. Sebald , William Faulkner , Yann Martel

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Experimenting the Human

Art, music, and the contemporary posthuman.

G Douglas Barrett

240 pages | 4 halftones | 6 x 9 | © 2023

Art: Art--General Studies

Media Studies

Music: General Music

Philosophy: Aesthetics

Philosophy of Science

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"Setting out from cybernetics’ collusion with neoliberal financialization, and probing the increasingly urgent question of the posthuman, Barrett’s compelling book asks ‘how to recompose posthumanism’. Deepening our understanding of experimental music’s journeying in postformalist artistic territories, and infused by critical race, queer, and feminist thinking, Barrett dialogues with the visionary work of six artists who cut through and reconfigure our troubled relations with technology through inventive practices that insistently bring the social and political back in."  

Georgina Born, professor of anthropology and music, UCL and global scholar, Princeton University

"Posing both uncomfortable questions and new possibilities for the understanding of music, Barrett trenchantly turns our attention to how experimental composers have long engaged with the critical issues of our time now being explored in many technological and humanistic fields. These essays ringingly assert the centrality of new musical expression in constituting both the human and the posthuman."  

George E. Lewis, Columbia University

" Experimenting the Human considers how experimental artists like Pamela Z, Nam June Paik, and Pauline Oliveros have critically engaged with the figure of the posthuman in their work. In the process, Barrett not only traces the possibilities of the posthuman disclosed through their artistic practice, but also the limits and blindspots they reveal, particularly given the posthuman's lingering, latent indebtedness to the raced, classed, and gendered exclusions that have long defined the human. Ambitious in scope and virtuosic in execution, Barrett’s book will be of interest not just to music scholars but to critical thinkers of all stripes."  

Eric A. Drott, University of Texas

“Experimenting the Human examines an interdisciplinary, intergenerational roster of artists working across music, new media, and visual and performance art and contextualizes their experimental practices within histories and theories of technology and the posthuman from the Enlightenment to the present. Through these artists’ technological augmentation of the brain, hands, ear, and voice, Barrett shows how they have advanced unique modes of indeterminacy that register subjective precarity and difference. Their critical, resistant engagements with technology decenter human agency in ways that help us rethink the human for the past, present, and future, while also reaffirming our common humanity. Experimentalism, Barrett remarkably shows, has always been posthuman.”

Natilee Harren, University of Houston

"This is a well-written and informed text with extensive historical research that significantly expands and contextualises the various case studies discussed with reference to the others, enhancing the consistency of both the arguments and the subject matter.” 

Table of Contents

Christoph Cox

The Voice as Something More

Martha Feldman

Nightingales in Berlin

David Rothenberg

Computing Taste

Nick Seaver

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The Seven Greatest Examples of Experimentation in Art

The word “innovation” is one of the most commonly used words today, and when it comes to experimentation in art, the artists around the world has become super creative too

We currently live in an era where technology, art, and environment share similar ideas and works together in producing innovative artworks by artists. This has, indeed, improved skill as a whole.

Tracing back through time, you will discover an unending list of history books and art streams where seven prominent paintings have a similar story to tell.

These paintings reflect the artists’ mind in compelling us to view a subject in a different approach and perspective, and we should try to question the normalcy of the things we see.

Through their psychedelic and hyper-imagination, which they termed “normal,” was the way they expressed themselves and their ideologies.

Let us take a look at seven great examples of experimentation in art.

Grauer Tag Painting by George Grosz

George Grosz was well-known for his caricature-like paintings that showed how life looked like in the German city of Berlin at the time.

But in 1920-1921, Grosz looked for new agitprop with this work, one with stylish visual language.

With the use of mediums that breathes Italian metaphysical art themes, George Grosz went beyond Dada and New Objectivity group of the Weimar Republic era. Moving to the USA in 1933, he abandoned his earlier style of the subject matter.

The paintings reminded the world of Giorgio de Chirico , which was something that looked like faceless people in empty areas in front of some standard industrial buildings.

These details mostly represented political issues and statements rather than existential.

The painting exposes controversial issues that were highlighted by a low brick wall.

There was a cross-eyed German nationalist council officer in the foreground.

According to the New Objectivity exhibition in Manheim in 1925, the other men behind the welfare officer was a disabled war veteran, a worker, and a black market dealer.

The illustration of this art divided society into two classes.

Grosz, however, started using the critical ‘Verism’ style and did not produce any more oil paintings as the years passed.  

The Great Metaphysician by Giorgio Chirico

De Chirico was a mysterious man, and his ideologies reflected in his works. In this painting, he created an empty building square in the middle of a strange monument.

The monument was made with furniture parts and construction tools with an eerie overall display.

The edifice was lit up with the summer sunlight beaming upon it like a stage while the darkness of the skies in the horizons highlights the nightfall.

To maintain the discontinuity, the chimney of the factory can be seen in the sky where the modern era bursts into the cosmos of quattrocento.

For his transcended world view, De Chirico discovered Italy in a metaphysical stage. This view, however, was influenced by Nietzsche.

“The conception of a picture has to be something which does not make any sense in itself and no longer signifies at all from human logic,” He said.

The School of Athens by Raphael

Made by Raphael between 1509 and 1511, The School of Athens was identified as a sound reflection of the Renaissance theory .

The painting consists of many ideas of great and famous philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists formed into one image.

Here, men like Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Da Vinci, and many more can be seen in the painting.

The painting shows them learning and interacting with each other.

These great men did not live during the same time frame, but Raphael majestically brings them all together. This was meant to signify the celebration of that age.

The Italian Renaissance artist created the art piece to decorate the rooms in the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican. The rooms are now called the Stanze di Raffaello which was made to represent and pay homage to the Renaissance era.

The painting can still be found in some of the room sections, the Vatican, which was commissioned by his sponsor, Pope Julius II.

Der Radionist by Kurt Gunter

In early 1928, German art critic and historian Franz Roh discovered something about legendary paint created by Kurt Gunter.

He described the interiors as a petit-bourgeois living room.

However, this contradicts the intentions of Gunter’s idea.

“petit-bourgeois…has shut himself in on a Sunday with a crackling radio set, has clamped on headphones, opened a bottle of red wine and picked up an opera libretto and a cigar a vengeful bachelor’s idyll of our time and a musical fortification, with resistance glinting in his eyes.”

He described it as just a picture of Herr Schreck, a paraplegic and wheelchair-bound German listening to the radio as it broadcasts a program on October 29 th , 1923, which signified his improvement in expanding his social web.

In shaping the face of society, the theme of his painting highlighted the positivity and revolutionary effect of his invention.

It then later became a major subject of many more new objectives painting artworks to come.

Portrait of Madame Isabel Styler-Tas by Salvador Dali

This painting was created by the legendary Surrealists, Salvador Dali, in 1929.

The picture depicts the picture of successful Amsterdam jeweler Louis Tas’s daughter, Isabel, an arrogant and rich businesswoman.

The image had her wearing a sophisticated red clothe with a brooch of medusa pinned to her breast.

Behind her was a landscape embodied in deep fantasy. Opposite her was a fossilized version of herself, staring back at her.

With an excellent fascination for perspectives and illusion, Dali flirted with the modernism era, which was going through the cubist phase at the time.

He was able to translate old-fashioned artworks into modern issues, and that was one of the things that made him famous.

He also noted that “As far as a portrait painting goes, I intended to create a fateful connection between each of the different personalities and their backgrounds, in a manner far removed from direct symbolism.

This is in terms of medium and iconography to encapsulate the essence of each of my subject in mind”.

Roy Lichtenstein’s TAKKA TAKKA

In response to the revolution of popular culture in America in the 1950s and 1960s, there was an urgent need to maintain the status quo due to its power and growing fame.

After its emergence, there was no stopping in shaking up and then changing the perspective of art critics and conformist; in fact, the views of the whole world of art.

Takka Takka was created by Roy Lichtenstein , who was trained in the USA pilot and a World War II veteran but never saw combat.

He ironically used the style of a cartoon sound effect to name his work. “takka takka”; the sound of a firing machine gun. This artwork represents the entire elements of pop art and its importance.

About the cartoon shows and art of that time were always created to reach a common goal; a swashbuckling, funny, and ridiculously heroic commentary.

Using this style in effectively conveying his message, Lichtenstein aimed to leave a thought-provoking and effect on his audience using the juxtaposition to his advantage. This work is considered to be a great example of experimentation in art because of the artist’s courage to convey a strong perspective about a relevant subject

When Lichtenstein’s work was criticized for been militaristic, he smartly responded,” the heroes depicted in comic books are fascist types, but don’t take them seriously in these paintings. Maybe there is a point in not taking them seriously, a political position. I use them for purely formal reasons”.

The Suicide of Dorothy Hale by Frida Kahlo

This artwork is undoubtedly one of the most potent artworks to date. Despite the limited amount of details on the portrait, it was still powerful enough to shake the world when it was produced.

The artist displayed the image of Dorothy Hale’s suicide in a truly artistic manner – also one of the bold subjects when it comes to experimentation in art

However, it was not an initial plan of Frida Kahlo to paint the death of a fast-rising American actress of the time as she was commissioned to do. Read Frida Kahlo’s Lust for Life

The building she had fallen from can be seen behind almost entirely shrouded in clouds, representing the extent of the height in which she had reached and fell to her death. Frida passed her message in a strong sense of metaphor rather than literal.

Dorothy Hale’s body can be found at the bottom of the image, which symbolizes the impact of its realism.

20 famous paintings of Frida Kahlo

The painting possessed every sense of art, from the real to the surreal, which clearly shows every detail of Hale’s suicide.

Standing at 60.4 x 48.6 cm in the Pheonix Art Museum, the painting translates;

“In the city of New York on the twenty-first day of October 1938, at six o’clock in the morning, Mrs. Dorothy Hale committed suicide by throwing herself out of a very high window of the Hampshire House building. In her memory…”

Conclusion – Experimentation in Art

A brief story on how some of the most formidable artists have dug deep into their bright imagination and conjured great art pieces.

Using the medium of diverse technicalities, themes, and subjects, they flawlessly passed their message in a truly artistic manner that was sure to change the face of art as a whole.

Passionate experimenter with a heart for art, design, and tech. A relentless explorer of the culture, creative and innovative realms.

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Top 10 Experimental Films to Watch Right Now

The experimental film genre goes back as far as film history takes us. One of the first experimental films was done by Thomas Edison’s assistant, William Dickson, on the kinetoscope called “Monkeyshines No. 1” around 1889 or 1890. In fact, you could say all early silent cinema was experimental as the filmmakers were literally figuring out how to use the camera and editing to tell a story or use it to express or explore dreamlike visual art.

Out of experimental film came many new offshoots of the genre. One of the more prominent ones was avant-garde, which usually has no conventional point to them and focuses on exploring innovative and creative issues such as time, fantasy, dreams, or perception. The German silent film classic, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is one of the more famous early examples of dreams or perception.

Today, the genre has given birth to other offshoots, such as cinematic poetry and the cinematic diary, akin to the works of the late great Jonas Mekas. Even the experimental documentary has been around longer than viewers realize; the city symphony films are an early example or, more recently, Guy Maddin’s “My Winnipeg.”

Pulling from experimental film history and more recent works, here are ten experimental films you should watch.

Related: 10 Sci-Fi Short Films That Will Give You The Creeps

10 “Un Chien Andileu” (1929)

This is many film students’ introduction to experimental film. The French title translates to “An Andalusian Dog” and has nothing to do with the film itself. Crafted by Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali, this silent surrealist journey uses dream logic to construct a non-narrative that is very Freudian in its design and meant to be shocking.

The film’s concept is actually a mix of two dreams that both the creators had—Dali’s hand covered in ants and Bunuel cutting an eye with a blade. When watched, the film invokes unease in that you are trying to make sense of a dream and can’t. Our brains try to find something relatable in the film and sometimes can’t. When we do feel some sort of connection, it’s a completely different interpretation, which is what the filmmakers wanted. They wanted to leave you thinking and trying to make sense of it. They know you can’t exactly be just like a piece of surreal art; it’s always up for debate without any true solution.

This is what makes “Un Chien Andileu” a must see for anyone interested in experimental film. [1]

9 “The Life and Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra” (1928)

This film is a silent-film hidden gem. The film was made for $97 in 1928, and in American avant-garde cinema is considered one of the early pillars in the genre.

It centers on an actor who makes his way to Hollywood hoping to hit the big time, only to be dehumanized by studios, landing the role of a simple extra. They even write 9413 on his head, making him just a number in their system.

What makes the film so unique is how they leaned into their budget with a lack of resources and visually gave Hollywood this surreal emptiness, something that people from the outside had not seen before depicted. The use of German expressionist lighting, superimposition, twisting shapes, and disorienting angles really makes the film memorable as it visually shows the actor’s descent into madness and death caused by the demeaning dark side of Hollywood. [2]

8 “Manhatta” (1921)

This film is considered to be the true first American avant-garde film by many. “Manhatta” was a collaboration between painter Charles Sheeler and photographer Paul Strand. The non-narrative documentary is a visual poem that is simply exploring two things. First, it provided an abstract view of the city through carefully set up visual compositions. The second one is actually how the camera is used. This is done by experimenting with photography, film, minimalistic camera movement, and incidental motion in each film frame by exploring their relationships with each other.

Being a silent-era film, it does use intertitles, but unlike most films, it uses a Walt Whitman poem instead of dialogue or scene explanations. [3]

7 “From Afar” (2020)

An absolutely beautiful short film that will only take two minutes of your time. This is part of the cinematic poetry genre I mentioned earlier. Its simplicity and use of editing make it an experience that lingers.

Much like “The Life and Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra,” filmmaker and poet Andrei Purcarea uses what he has to his advantage to visually push the poem along. Many of the shots don’t have anything to do with what’s being said exactly when you watch, but at the same time, you get this feeling of understanding.

However, unlike “The Life and Death of 9413,” this film doesn’t have fast cuts or superimpositions. In fact, the editing and pacing are more akin to “Manhatta,” visually telling us a story to go along with the poem. Is this whole film really about a ship, or is it more about something in life that represents a ship we missed and can’t see anymore? What did the characters miss? Who did they miss? The use of the lone red chair and the mirror on this beach looking out at sea…very existential. Very experimental. Very moving. [4]

6 “Catharsis” (2018)

This short film beautifully uses the experimental style to invoke emotion as we journey into the subject’s mind. It is a surreal reminder that we may not know what someone is going through, even if they seem calm on the outside. This film by Naleeka Dennis follows Marsha as she struggles to cope with the loss of her beloved by attempting to live in a fantasy world. But she must eventually deal with her grief.

The ending shot especially hammers this home as the world seems very eerie around her now. It was the same before we dove into her mind, but knowing what she is dealing with really changes your perspective. [5]

5 “Until There Was Nothing” (2020)

This wonderful short was released last year and really takes on a fantastic premise—standing on Earth in its final moments as it enters a black hole. Created by Paul Trillo, the images at first seem beautiful but suddenly change as they stretch toward the sky. While it may seem like a bleak film at first, Trillo notes, “Someday this will pass and there will be nothing left… That’s not something to fear ‘because we come from nothing’ as Alan Watts puts it… and from nothing comes something new.”

The surreal visuals caused by intense gravitational forces with the use of philosopher Alan Watt’s talking about the meaning of nothingness really gives the film a much deeper feel. [6]

4 “Stellar” (1993)

Stan Brakhage is the perfect mix of artist and filmmaker. With 380 films to his credit, it’s hard to choose which one to even pick. Brakhage’s work is unique and can be best described as live paintings. Meaning that he would paint or scratch or do something on each frame and then project it. The results were really mind-blowing. “Stellar” stands out to me as it feels like something that could’ve been used in early sci-fi films like 2001: A Space Odyssey or TV shows like the original Star Trek .

The last few frames are particularly surprising as a strange picture appears amongst the starry images. Like all art, “Stellar” is whatever you perceive it to be. For me, its a journey through space and the birth of the universes, with the first creature in the universe coming into being at the end. See how you interpret it. [7]

3 “Night Mayor” (2009)

A fantastic gem of a film. Guy Maddin’s visuals harken back to early silent film while giving a touch of modernity by filming on newer formats that even include VHS. Yet it’s his use of lighting, old-school tricks, and editing that really helps give this film its surreal aspect. Like we are watching a dream.

“Night Mayor” is a visual journey into the mind of a Bosnian immigrant, Nihad Ademi, who thinks he has discovered a way to harness the power of the Aurora Borealis in order to broadcast imagery from coast to coast. [8]

An absolute must-see short film!

2 “Light Is Calling” (2004)

Bill Morrison is an amazing filmmaker. He is unique in that he helps bring forgotten or close to decaying films back to life as experimental cinema. I highly suggest his film Decasia (2002) and Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016).

“Light Is Calling” is a short he did in 2004 in which he takes decaying nitrate film from 1926 titled “The Bells” and gives it new life.

After having the film optically reprinted, it is edited into a new format to go along with a 7-minute composition by Michael Gordon. IMDb describes the film best as a “meditation on the fleeting nature of life and love, as seen through the roiling emulsion of film.” [9]

A magnificent decaying dream.

1 “Meshes of the Afternoon” (1943)

Maya Deren was a jack of all trades. She was a dancer, choreographer, film theorist, poet, photographer, avant-garde promoter, and experimental filmmaker.

Deren believed that film should be an experience. “Meshes of the Afternoon” is definitely that—and a very important experimental piece. The film is considered one of the most influential experimental films in the history of American cinema.

The film is essentially a dream. Using dreamlike logic to create a unique experience for the viewer, it follows a female character who falls asleep after returning home. Her vivid dreams draw us in as her darker inner desires play out before our eyes. It’s actually hard to distinguish reality from the dream, but that is the point. She involves you mentally. [10]

A very influential piece on many filmmakers, including the works of David Lynch.

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Experimental Philosophy: An Introduction

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The mid-seventeenth century witnessed a significant rise in the use of experiments as a means of finding out about the natural world. While experimentation itself was not new, it was ascribed a new foundational importance for natural philosophy. The rise in experimentalism, therefore, can be characterized by two related trends. First, we see an increase in the number and quality of experiments, as well as advancements in instrument-making and experimental and data management techniques. Second, we see a shift toward philosophical and methodological views that placed experimentation at the center of natural philosophy. In Britain, advocates of this new natural philosophy based on observation and experiment called themselves...

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Experimental Philosophy

Experimental philosophy is an interdisciplinary approach that brings together ideas from what had previously been regarded as distinct fields. Specifically, research in experimental philosophy brings together two key elements:

• the kinds of questions and theoretical frameworks traditionally associated with philosophy;
• the kinds of experimental methods traditionally associated with psychology and cognitive science.

Though experimental philosophy is united by this broad approach, there is a diverse range of projects in experimental philosophy. Some use experimental evidence to support a “negative program” that challenges more traditional methods in analytic philosophy, others use experimental data to support positive claims about traditional questions, and still others explore questions about how people ordinarily think and feel insofar as these questions are important in themselves.

This entry provides a brief introduction to the core aims of contemporary experimental philosophy. It then reviews recent experimental work on the negative program, free will, moral judgment and epistemology. We conclude with a discussion of major objections to the field of experimental philosophy as a whole.

1. Overview

2.1.1 the argument from diversity, 2.1.2 the argument from sensitivity, 2.2 free will and moral responsibility, 2.3 impact of moral judgment, 2.4 epistemology, 2.5 other topics, 3.1.1 philosophers don’t rely on intuitions, 3.1.2 philosophers shouldn’t rely on intuitions, 3.2 defending privileged intuitions rather than those of ordinary experimental participants, 3.3 but is it philosophy, other internet resources, related entries.

Experimental philosophy is a relatively new approach, usually understood as beginning only in the early years of the 21st century. At the heart of this new approach is the idea of pursuing philosophical questions using methods more typically associated with the social sciences.

Within the broad banner of experimental philosophy research, one finds work using an enormous variety of methods and aims (see, e.g., Schwitzgebel & Rust 2014; Meskin et al. 2013; Bartels & Urminsky 2011). Nonetheless, most research in experimental philosophy makes use of a collection of closely connected methods that in some way involve the study of intuitions. The remainder of this section aims to characterize the different projects experimental philosophers have pursued using these methods and their relevance for broader questions in philosophy.

The practice of exploring intuitions has its origins in a more traditional philosophical approach that long predates the birth of experimental philosophy (see the entry on intuition ). Research within this more traditional approach often relies on the idea that we can make progress on one or another topic by looking at intuitions about that topic. For example, within epistemology, it has been suggested that we can make progress on questions about the nature of knowledge by looking at intuitions about whether certain states count as knowledge. Similarly, within moral philosophy, it has been suggested that we can make progress on questions about moral obligation by looking at intuitions about what actions certain agents are obligated to perform. Similar approaches have been advocated in numerous other areas of philosophy.

There is a complex literature within the analytic tradition about how to understand this traditional method. Some argue that the study of intuitions gives us insight into concepts (Jackson 1998), others argue that the study of intuitions gives us a more direct sort of insight into the actual properties or relations those concepts pick out (Sosa 2007), and still others argue that this whole way of conceiving of the project is a mistaken one (e.g., Cappelen 2012).

It is commonplace to divide existing research in experimental philosophy into distinct projects in accordance with their different relationships to this prior tradition. Dividing things up in this way, one arrives at three basic kinds of research in experimental philosophy.

First, some experimental philosophy research has a purely ‘negative’ relationship to this more traditional use of intuitions. Such research aims to provide evidence that the method used in the more traditional work is in some way flawed or unreliable. For example, it has been argued that intuitions differ across demographic factors such as gender or ethnicity, or that they are subject to order effects, or that they can be influenced by incidental emotion (e.g., Weinberg et al. 2001; Buckwalter & Stich 2014; Swain et al. 2008; Cameron et al. 2013). To the extent that intuitions show these effects, it is argued, we should not be relying uncritically on intuition as a method for addressing substantive philosophical questions. This first project is called ‘negative’ in that it is not intended to make progress on the original philosophical question (e.g., about the nature of knowledge) but only to argue against a specific method for addressing that question (appeal to intuition).

This project has triggered a large and multi-faceted literature among philosophers interested in its metaphilosophical implications (Brown 2013b; Cappelen 2012; Deutsch 2015; Weinberg 2007; Weinberg et al. 2010; Williamson 2007). This literature has explored the question as to whether empirical facts about the patterns in people’s intuitions could give us reason to change our philosophical practices. Much of this work is quite closely tied to prior philosophical work about the role of intuition in philosophy more generally.

Second, some research in experimental philosophy aims to make further progress on precisely the sorts of questions that motivated prior work within analytic philosophy. Thus, this research looks at epistemic intuitions as a way of making progress in epistemology, moral intuitions as a way of making progress in moral philosophy, and so forth. Experimental philosophers pursuing this second project have offered various different accounts of the way in which facts about intuitions could yield progress on these philosophical issues, but the most common approach proceeds by advancing some specific hypothesis about the underlying cognitive processes that generate intuitions in a particular domain. The suggestion is then that this hypothesis can help us assess which intuitions in this domain are worthy of our trust and which should simply be dismissed or ignored (Gerken 2017; Leslie 2013; Greene 2008; Nagel 2010).

Work within this second project has inspired a certain amount of metaphilosophical debate, but its main impact on the philosophical literature has been not at the level of metaphilosophy but rather in discussions of individual philosophical questions. Thus, philosophers interested in epistemic contextualism discuss experiments on people’s intuitions about knowledge (DeRose 2011), philosophers interested in incompatibilism discuss experiments on people’s intuitions about free will (Björnsson & Pereboom 2014; Vargas 2013), and philosophers interested in interventionist accounts of causation discuss experiments on people’s intuitions about causation (Woodward 2014). Work in this vein typically does not focus primarily on more abstract theories about the role of intuitions in philosophy. Instead, it draws more on theories about the particular topic under study (theories of knowledge, free will, causation).

The third type of research being conducted in experimental philosophy is not concerned either way with the kind of project pursued in more traditional analytic philosophy; it is just doing something else entirely. Specifically, in many cases, experimental philosophers are not looking at people’s thoughts and feelings about some topic as a way of making progress on questions about that topic; they are instead trying to make progress on questions that are directly about people’s thoughts and feelings themselves . For example, much of the experimental philosophy research in moral psychology is concerned with questions that truly are about moral psychology itself.

Research in this third vein tends to be highly interdisciplinary. Thus, work on any particular topic within this third vein tends to be at least relatively continuous with work on that same topic in other disciplines (psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, etc.), and the impact of such work is often felt just as much in those other disciplines as in philosophy specifically.

The distinction between these projects has proven helpful within metaphilosophical work on the significance of experimental philosophy, but it should be noted that the metaphilosophical distinction between these three projects does not correspond in any straightforward way to the distinctions between the different concrete research programs experimental philosophers pursue (on free will intuitions, on moral intuitions, on epistemic intuitions, etc.). Each of these concrete research programs can be relevant to a number of different projects, and indeed, it often happens that a single paper reports a result that seems relevant to more than one of these projects. Thus, as we review the actual experimental research coming out of experimental philosophy, we will need to turn away from the metaphilosophical distinction between projects and turn instead to distinctions between concrete research topics.

2. Research in Experimental Philosophy

The best way to get a sense of what experimental philosophy is all about is not just to consider it in the abstract but to look in detail at a few ongoing research programs in the field. Accordingly, we proceed in this section by reviewing existing research in four specific areas: the negative program, free will, the impact of moral judgment, and epistemology.

We focus on these four areas because they have received an especially large amount of attention within the existing experimental philosophy of literature. We should note, however, that experimental philosophers have explored an enormous range of different questions, and work in these four specific areas comprises only a relatively small percentage of the experimental philosophy literature as a whole.

2.1 The Negative Program

In the Theaetetus, Socrates asks, “Herein lies the difficulty which I can never solve to my satisfaction—What is knowledge?” (146a). The subsequent philosophical discussion often proceeds by setting out various hypotheses, e.g., that knowledge is true belief, and considering possible counterexamples to the hypothesis. So, for instance, Socrates argues that knowledge isn’t simply true belief because a skilled lawyer can persuade a person to have a belief that is true, but that belief wouldn’t actually be knowledge [see the entry on the Theaetetus ]. Socrates typically expects, and receives, agreement from his interlocutor. Nor does Socrates ask his interlocutor, “What is your conception of knowledge” or “What counts as knowledge for Athenians?” Rather, he seems to expect a global answer about what knowledge is. In addition, he seems to expect that knowledge has a single nature, as suggested by his telling Theaetetus, “I want you… to give one single account of the many branches of knowledge” (148d).

Work in the negative program of experimental philosophy uses empirical work to challenge this traditional philosophical project. Two somewhat different challenges have been developed.

One challenge arises from the prospect of systematic diversity in how different populations of people think about philosophical questions. The possibility of such diversity had been raised before (e.g., Stich 1990), but experimental philosophers have sought to provide evidence of such diversity. For instance, an early study reported differences between East Asian students and Western students on famous cases from epistemology (Weinberg et al. 2001). Another early study provided evidence for cultural differences in judgments about reference. East Asians were more likely than Westerners to have descriptivist judgments about the reference of proper names (Machery et al. 2004). Some studies have also found gender differences in intuitions about philosophical cases (see, e.g., Buckwalter & Stich 2014; Friesdorf et al. 2015). In addition, there are systematic individual differences in philosophical intuition; for example, people who are more extraverted are more inclined to compatibilism about responsibility (Feltz & Cokely 2009).

This apparent diversity in intuitions about philosophical matters has been used to challenge the use of intuitions in philosophy to tell us about the nature of things like knowledge and reference. If intuitions about knowledge turn out to exhibit diversity between populations, then this looks to put pressure on a traditional philosophical project. In rough form, the worry arises from the following claims:

• D1. The philosophical tradition uses intuitions regarding philosophically important categories or kinds like knowledge in an effort to determine the nature of those categories
• D2. Knowledge (like many other philosophical categories) has a single nature. It’s not the case that knowledge is one thing in Athens and another thing in Sparta.
• D3. Intuitions about philosophical categories systematically vary between populations (by culture, for instance)
• D4. The diversity in intuition cannot be dismissed by privileging the intuitions of one population.

Each of these claims has been challenged. Some argue that philosophers do not—or should not—rely on intuitions (thus rejecting D1) (see section 3.1 ); others hold, contra D4, that certain populations (e.g., professional philosophers) are specially positioned to have reliable intuitions (see section 3.2 ).

Another way to defuse the challenge is to argue (contra D2) that we needn’t suppose that knowledge has a single nature, but instead allow for a kind of pluralism. For instance, “knowledge” might pick out different epistemic notions in different communities. A pluralist might allow, or even celebrate, this diversity. Even if other communities have different epistemic values than we do, this need not undermine our valuing knowledge, as it is construed in our community (e.g., Sosa 2009: 109; also Lycan 2006). For a pluralist, empirical demonstrations of diversity needn’t undermine traditional philosophical methods, but might instead reveal important epistemic features that we have missed.

A more conservative response to the challenge, which leaves traditional philosophy largely untouched, is to question whether there really is diversity between populations in intuitions about philosophical categories. One way to develop this response is to claim that participants in different populations might simply interpret the scenarios in different ways; in that case, we could explain their different answers by saying that they are responding to different questions (e.g., Sosa 2009).

More importantly, a growing body of empirical evidence has called into question the claim that there really are large differences in philosophical intuitions across populations. Some of the original findings of culture differences have not replicated (e.g., Nagel et al. 2013; Kim & Yuan 2015); similarly, many of the original findings of gender differences haven’t replicated (e.g., Seyedsayamdost 2015; Adleberg et al. 2015). These findings provide strong reason to believe that some of the effects suggested by early experimental philosophy studies do not, in fact, exist at all. Moreover, experimental philosophers have also uncovered robust cross-cultural uniformity. For instance, one recent cross-cultural study examined intuitions about Gettier cases across four very different cultures (Brazil, India, Japan, and the USA), with participants in all groups tending to deny knowledge to the protagonist in Gettier cases (Machery et al. 2015). This suggests that there might be a universal “core folk epistemology” (Machery et al. 2015). In any case, these kinds of results suggest that there is less diversity than had been suggested.

The foregoing argument is based on diversity between populations. But experimental philosophers in the negative program have also used intra-individual diversity to undermine traditional philosophical methods (Swain et al. 2008; Sinnott-Armstrong 2008; Weinberg 2016). Experimental philosophers have found that people’s judgments about philosophical cases are sensitive to various kinds of contextual factors that seem to be philosophically irrelevant. The same person will give different responses depending on apparently irrelevant factors of presentation. People’s judgments about cases are affected by the induction of irrelevant emotions (Cameron et al. 2013), the order in which cases are presented (Petrinovich and O’Neill 1996; Swain et al. 2008; Wright 2010), and the way an outcome is described (e.g., Petrinovich and O’Neill 1996; Schwitzgebel & Cushman 2015).

Sensitivity to contextual factors has been used to challenge the philosophical use of intuition in a way that is somewhat distinct from the diversity argument. The challenge begins with the same assumption about the role of intuitions in philosophy, but then draws on somewhat different considerations:

• S1. The philosophical tradition uses intuitions regarding philosophically important categories or kinds like knowledge in an effort to determine the nature of those categories
• S2. A person’s judgments about philosophical cases are sensitive to contextual factors like the order of presentation.
• S3. Sensitivity to these factors is epistemically inappropriate
• S4. This inappropriate sensitivity cannot be dismissed by privileging the intuitions of one population (e.g., philosophers)
• S5. We can’t tell, from the armchair, which of our judgments are inappropriately sensitive in this way.

This set of claims presents a challenge because it seems that even philosophers are susceptible to these epistemically inapt influences, and we can’t tell which of our intuitions are to be trusted. Thus, philosophers are on shaky epistemic ground when they rely on their intuitions to try to glean philosophical truths.

Obviously, the argument from sensitivity is developed in different ways depending on the category in question and the evidence of sensitivity, but it’s useful to see how the general claims (S1–S5) might be questioned. (See section 3.1 for the rejection of intuition in philosophy (S1) and section 3.2 for a defense of privileged populations [contra S4]).

Although there are replicable effects on the influence of contextual factors, pace S2 many of these effects seem too small to threaten the practice of relying on intuitions (see, e.g., Demaree-Cotton 2016; May 2014). The effect might amount to the difference between 2.2 and 2.5 on a 7 point scale. It’s hard to see how such a difference threatens the practice of relying on the operative intuitions.

In some cases, contextual factors have more pronounced effects, and do lead to changes in participants’ verdict about a case. For instance, judgments about certain moral dilemmas and judgments about certain epistemic cases are changed depending on previously seen cases (e.g., Petrinovich & O’Neill 1996; Swain et al. 2008). However, it’s possible that participants respond differently to a case because the contextual differences actually provide an epistemically appropriate basis for changing one’s judgment. For instance, in the order effect studies, seeing one case can provide evidence about the appropriate response on another case (Horne & Livengood 2016). On this view, we can grant that participants change their judgment, but deny that they are doing so in a way that is epistemically inappropriate.

Finally, even if people’s judgments do change in epistemically inappropriate ways, people might be able to recognize which judgments are especially trustworthy. For instance, only some thought experiments are susceptible to order effects, and it turns out that for these thought experiments, people have lower confidence in their responses (e.g., Wright 2010; Zamzow & Nichols 2009). This suggests (contra D5) that there might be an internal resource—confidence—that can be used to discern which judgments are epistemically unstable.

Research in experimental philosophy has explored many aspects of lay beliefs regarding free will. Experimental philosophers have designed improved scales for measuring belief in free will (Nadelhoffer et al. 2014; Deery et al. 2015), they have investigated the role of the desire to punish in attributing free will (Clark et al. 2014), and they have examined the impact of the belief in free will on moral behavior (Baumeister et al. 2009). But the most intensively studied issue concerns intuitions about whether free will is compatible with determinism.

Experimental philosophers have argued that the philosophical defense of incompatibilism depends on intuitions (e.g., Nahmias et al., 2006). The question about whether incompatibilism is true depends on a wide variety of factors, but experimental philosophers have argued that one factor that plausibly matters is the alleged intuitiveness of the thought that determinism is incompatible with free will (Murray & Nahmias 2014, but see Sommers 2010). This then generates a question that invites an empirical inquiry: is incompatibilism intuitive? (Nahmias et al. 2006).

One of the first experimental studies on free will found that people seemed to have compatibilist intuitions. Participants were presented with a scenario describing a deterministic universe, and then asked whether a person in the scenario was free and morally responsible (Nahmias et al. 2006). In one case, participants were asked to imagine a future scenario in which there is a supercomputer that is capable of predicting all future human behavior when provided with a complete description of the universe along with the laws of nature. In this scenario, a man robs a bank, and participants are asked whether the man is morally responsible for his action. Somewhat surprisingly, most participants gave compatibilist answers, saying that the person was morally blameworthy. This basic finding held across a number of scenarios.

In these early studies on intuitions about free will and moral responsibility, the description of determinism focused on the fact that in a deterministic universe, every event is in principle predictable from the past and the laws. In addition, the scenarios involved particular agents in our world doing bad things. Later studies emphasized the causal nature of determinism—that what happens at a given point is completely caused by what happened previously—and stressed that what happens in a deterministic universe is inevitable given the past. Even with this description of determinism, participants still tend to say that a specific concrete individual in such a universe who commits a heinous crime is free and responsible (Nichols & Knobe 2007; Roskies & Nichols 2008). However, when asked a more abstract question about whether it is possible in general for people in such a deterministic universe to be free and responsible, participants tend to say that morally responsibility is not possible in a deterministic universe. This incompatibilist response was also found in a cross cultural sample with participants from India, Hong Kong, Colombia, and the United States (Sarkissian et al. 2010). In addition to the abstract nature of the question, another important element seems to be whether one is considering an alternate deterministic universe or contemplating the possibility that our own universe is deterministic. When led to consider our own universe as deterministic, participants were more likely to say that people would still be morally responsible (Roskies & Nichols 2008).

Thus, it seems like people give compatibilist responses under some conditions and incompatibilist responses under others. One reaction to this apparent inconsistency is to treat one set of responses as defective. Some experimental philosophers maintain that it’s the incompatibilist responses that don’t reflect people’s true judgments. The best developed version of this view maintains people aren’t affirming incompatibilist responses at all (Nahmias & Murray 2011; Murray & Nahmias 2014). Instead, when people deny free will and responsibility it’s because they misunderstand the description of determinism. In particular, people mistakenly interpret the description of determinism to mean that our mental states lack causal efficacy, that the production of our behavior “bypasses” our mental states. That is, on this view, people wrongly think that determinism means that a person will behave as she does regardless of what she thinks, wants, or intends (Murray & Nahmias 2014).

Of course, if people’s mental states have no impact on their behavior, that is an excellent reason to think that people aren’t morally responsible for their behaviors. So, if people interpret determinism to mean bypassing , it is perfectly rational for them to infer the lack of free will and responsibility from bypassing. However, it seems to be a flat-out confusion to interpret determinism as bypassing. Even if determinism is true, our behavior might be caused (not bypassed) by our mental states. Thus, if people give incompatibilist responses because they confuse determinism with bypassing, then people’s responses don’t reflect a real commitment to incompatibilism.

Surprisingly, people do make bypassing judgments when given a description of causal determinism. For instance, when presented with a description of a determinist universe, many participants agreed that in that universe, “what a person wants has no effect on what they end up doing” (Murray & Nahmias 2014). This suggests that people go through the following confused process: determinism means bypassing, and bypassing means no free will. If that’s right, then the incompatibilist response really is a confusion. However, another explanation is that people think that determinism means no free will, and it’s the denial of free will that leads to the bypassing judgments. The idea would be roughly that if we don’t have free will, then in some way our mental states don’t lead to our behavior in the way we had thought. Some experimental philosophers have used statistical causal modeling to try to tease these two possibilities apart, arguing that it’s the latter explanation that is the right one (Björnsson 2014; Rose & Nichols 2013). That is, people take determinism to entail that there is no free will, and it is this judgment that there is no free will that leads to the bypassing judgment.

Thus, there is some reason to think that incompatibilist responses do reflect many people’s intuitions. What about the compatibilist responses? Some experimental philosophers maintain that it is these judgments that are distorted. On one view, the distortion is caused by emotional reactions (e.g., Nichols & Knobe 2007). However, a meta-analysis indicates that there is very little evidence that emotions play a critical role in generating compatibilist judgments (Feltz & Cova 2014). A different argument for demoting compatibilist judgments holds that many people who affirm free will in deterministic scenarios lack any sensitivity to compatibilist considerations, but instead will affirm free will even under fatalistic conditions in which it is explicitly stipulated that John’s behavior is inevitable “regardless of the past events in John’s life and the laws of nature”. (This view is dubbed “free will no matter what”; Feltz & Millan 2015.) One line of argument based on these results is that if people’s attributions of free will are so insensitive, it can hardly be said that people appreciate the consistency of free will and determinism. However, subsequent studies found that in these fatalistic scenarios, subjects who affirmed free will still tended to think that the source of the action was in the agent, in harmony with “source compatibilism” (Andow & Cova 2016).

Thus, the state of the evidence currently suggests that people do have both incompatibilist and compatibilist intuitions. Future empirical work might uncover more clearly what factors and processes draws people in one direction or the other. There are also open questions about whether the role of different psychological mechanisms in intuitions about free will has implications for philosophical questions for whether we are truly free and responsible.

It is common to distinguish between two kinds of judgments that people make about morally significant situations. On one hand, people can make straightforwardly moral judgments (e.g., judgments about moral wrongness, about obligation, about blameworthiness). On the other, they can make judgments that might be morally relevant but that still appear to be in some important sense non-moral judgments (about whether the agent acted intentionally, whether she caused certain outcomes, whether she knew what she was doing). A question now arises as to how to understand the relationship between these two different kinds of judgments.

One possible view would be that the relationship is entirely unidirectional. Thus, it might be thought that (a) people’s moral judgments depend on prior non-moral judgments, but (b) people’s non-moral judgments do not depend on prior moral judgments. We can illustrate this view with the example of the relationship between people’s moral judgments and their intentional action judgments. It seems clear that people’s moral judgments about whether an agent is deserving of blame might depend on prior non-moral judgments about whether this agent acted intentionally. However, one might think that things do not go in the opposite direction. It is not as though your non-moral judgment that the agent acted intentionally could depend on a prior moral judgment that her action was wrong.

Although this view might seem intuitively compelling, a series of studies in experimental philosophy have called it into question. These studies suggest that people’s moral judgments can impact their judgments even about what might appear to be entirely non-moral questions. Such results have been obtained for a wide variety of different apparently non-moral judgments.

• When an agent knows that she will bring about an outcome but is not specifically trying to bring it about, people are more inclined to say that she brought it about intentionally when it is morally bad than when it is morally good (Knobe 2003).
• When an agent correctly believes that an outcome will arise but is only correct in this belief as the result of a coincidence, people are more inclined to say that she has knowledge when the outcome is morally bad than when it is morally good (Beebe & Shea 2013; Buckwalter 2014).
• When an agent has a lot of positive emotion and a high opinion of her life, people are less inclined to say that she is truly happy when her life is morally bad than when it is morally good (Phillips, Nyholm & Liao 2014).
• When a number of different factors are each individually necessary for an outcome to arise, people are more inclined to regard one of the factors as a cause when it is morally bad than when it is morally good (Alicke 1992; Hitchcock & Knobe 2009).

Effects of moral judgment have also been observed on numerous other judgments, including everything from action individuation (Ulatowski, 2012) to attributions of weakness of will (May & Holton 2012) to the semantics of gradable adjectives (Egré & Cova 2015).

These findings might be philosophically relevant at two different levels. On one hand, each individual effect might be relevant to philosophical work that aims to understand the corresponding concept or property. Thus, the findings about intentional action judgments might be relevant to philosophical work about intentional action, those about happiness judgments might be relevant to philosophical work about happiness, and so forth. At the same time, the general finding that moral judgment has this pervasive influence might be relevant to philosophical work that focuses on the human mind and the way people make sense of the world. For example, these findings could help us to understand the nature of folk psychology or the relationship between our ordinary folk theories and more systematic scientific theories.

To make progress on these two issues, research has focused on trying to understand why these effects arise. That is, researchers have aimed to provide hypotheses about the precise cognitive processes that give rise to the patterns observed in people’s judgments. These hypotheses then, in turn, have implications for philosophical questions both about specific concepts and properties and about the human mind.

Existing research has led to a proliferation of hypotheses, drawing on theoretical frameworks from a variety of fields (see Cova 2016 for a review of seventeen hypotheses about the intentional action effect). Still, although there are numerous distinct specific hypotheses, it seems that the basic approaches can be grouped into four broad families.

First, it might be that the effect is not truly driven by moral judgment . Existing studies show that people make different judgments depending on whether the agent is doing something helpful or harmful, but of course, there are many differences between helpful and harmful actions other than their moral status. For example, a number of researchers have argued that the effect is in fact driven by people’s beliefs about the mental states of the agents in the vignettes (Sloman, Fernbach & Ewing 2012; Sripada & Konrath 2011). Agents will tend to have different sorts of mental states when they are doing something helpful than when they are doing something harmful, and it might be that this difference in mental states is driving all of the observed effects.

Second, it might be that the effect is indeed driven by moral judgment but that it is the result of an error . On this view, moral considerations do not play any real role in the concepts at work here (people’s concepts of intentional action, of happiness, etc.). Rather, people’s judgments are being biased or distorted by some further process which gets in the way of their ability to correctly apply their own concepts. For example, some researchers have argued that the effect is due to a process of motivated cognition (Alicke, Rose & Bloom 2011). People believe the agent to be blameworthy and want to justify that belief. This desire to justify blame then distorts their judgments about what might seem to be purely factual matters.

Third, it might be that the effect is driven by moral judgment and doesn’t involve an error but nonetheless simply reflects a fact about how people use words , rather than a fact about their application of the corresponding concepts. Researchers often make inferences from facts about how people use certain words (‘intentionally,’ ‘happy,’ ‘knows’) about how people apply the corresponding concepts (the concept of intentional action, of happiness, of knowledge). However, it is also possible for factors to influence the use of our words without influencing the use of these concepts, and some researchers have suggested that this is the process at work in the present effects. For example, it has been suggested that these effects arise as a result of conversational pragmatics, with people trying to avoid the pragmatic implicatures that would be generated by making certain claims that are in fact literally true (Adams & Steadman 2004). Alternatively, it has been suggested that the relevant words (e.g., ‘intentionally’) are actually associated with more than one different concept and that the impact of morality arises not because morality plays a role in any of these concepts but rather because it plays a role in the way people resolve the ambiguity of the word itself (Nichols & Ulatowski 2007). On these sorts of views, people are not necessarily making a mistake when their use of language is impacted by moral judgment, but all the same, moral judgment is not playing a role in their more basic capacities to make sense of the world.

Fourth, it might be that moral judgment actually plays a role in people’s basic capacities to apply the relevant concepts . For example, it has been argued that the concept of happiness is itself a value-laden concept (Phillips et al. 2014). Similarly, it has been suggested the concepts of intentional action and causation make use of a form of counterfactual thinking in which moral judgments play a key role (Icard, Kominsky & Knobe 2017; Phillips, Luguri & Knobe 2015). On this last view, the effects observed in these experiments point to a genuine role for moral judgment in the most basic capacities underlying people’s application of the relevant concepts.

Debates between these rival views remain ongoing. Within the more recent literature, discussion of these questions has become increasingly interdisciplinary, with many of the key contributions turning to methods from cognitive neuroscience, developmental psychology, or computational cognitive science.

Within experimental work in epistemology, the primary focus of research has been on the patterns of people’s ordinary attributions of knowledge . As we’ve seen ( section 2.1 ), evidence on epistemic intuitions plays a prominent role in the negative program. But work in experimental epistemology has not been dominated by any one single issue or question. Rather, it has been divided among a number of different strands of research, which have each been pursued separately.

One important topic has been the role of stakes in people’s knowledge attributions. Suppose that Keith considers some available evidence and then concludes (correctly) that the bank will be open on Saturday. Now consider two cases. In the low-stakes case, it is not especially important whether the bank actually is open. By contrast, in the high-stakes case, Keith’s whole financial future depends on whether the bank is open or not. The key question now is whether this difference in stakes has any impact on whether it is correct to say: “Keith knows that the bank will be open”.

Within the non-experimental literature, philosophers have appealed to a wide variety of arguments to help resolve this question. Although many of these arguments do not directly involve people’s intuitions about cases (Brown 2013a; see also Fantl & McGrath 2009; Hawthorne 2004), some specifically rely on the empirical claim that people would be more willing to attribute knowledge when the stakes are low than when the stakes are high (DeRose 1992). Among philosophers who accept this empirical claim, there has been considerable debate about precisely how to explain the purported impact of stakes (DeRose 1992; Hawthorne 2004; Rysiew 2001; Stanley 2005).

Surprisingly, a number of early findings from the experimental epistemology literature suggested that people’s ordinary knowledge attributions actually don’t depend on stakes. For example, people seem to say that Keith knows the bank will be open on Saturday not only in the low-stakes case but also in the high-stakes case (Buckwalter 2010; Feltz & Zarpentine 2010; May et al. 2010). This experimental finding threatens to undermine the entire debate within the non-experimental epistemology literature. After all, if there is no effect of stakes, then there is no question as to how to understand this effect.

Subsequent experimental work in this area has therefore focused on the question as to whether the stakes effect even exists at all. Some have criticized the early experiments that did not find an effect (DeRose 2011). Others have shown that although the effect does not emerge in the experimental paradigms used by those early experiments, it does emerge in other paradigms (Pinillos 2012; Sripada & Stanley 2012; but see Buckwalter & Schaffer 2015, for a critique). Regardless of how these debates are resolved, recent experimental work seems to have established, at a very minimum, that the pattern of people’s epistemic intuitions is not quite the way it was assumed to be within the previous non-experimental literature.

A second question concerns the relationship between knowledge and belief. Clearly, a mental state can only count as knowledge if it satisfies certain conditions that go beyond anything that would be required for the state to count as belief. Thus, there can be cases in which a person believes that p but does not know that p . A question arises, however, as to whether the converse also holds. That is, a question arises as to whether a mental state must satisfy certain conditions to count as a belief that go beyond what would be required for it to count as knowledge. Can there be cases in which a person knows that p but does not believe that p ?

Strikingly, a series of studies suggest that people do attribute knowledge in certain cases in which they would not be willing to attribute belief (Myers-Schulz & Schwitzgebel 2013; see also Murray et al. 2013; Rose & Schaffer 2013; Buckwalter et al. 2015; Shields 2016). In one study, participants were given a vignette about a student taking a history test who faces the question: “What year did Queen Elizabeth die?” She has reviewed this date many times, but at that one moment, she is flustered by the pressure and can’t recall the answer. She therefore decides just to guess, and she writes down ‘1603.’ In fact, this is the correct answer. When given this vignette, experimental participants tended to say that (a) the student knows that Queen Elizabeth died in 1603 but to deny that (b) she believes that Queen Elizabeth died in 1603 (Myers-Schulz & Schwitzgebel 2013, drawing on a vignette from Radford). Similar effects have been obtained for numerous other cases (Murray et al. 2013; Rose & Schaffer 2013; Buckwalter et al. 2015; Shields 2016).

Research in this area aims to understand why this effect arises and what implications it has for epistemology. One view is that people’s concept of belief truly does involve certain conditions that are not required by their concept of knowledge (Myers-Schulz & Schwitzgebel 2013). An alternative view is that there is more than one sense of ‘belief,’ such that knowledge requires the mental state picked out by one of the senses but not the other. Within work that adopts this latter approach, there have been a number of more specific suggestions about how to spell out the difference between the two senses and what relation each has to the ordinary concept of knowledge (Rose & Schaffer 2013; Buckwalter et al. 2015).

Experimental epistemology has also explored numerous other issues. A series of studies indicate that people actually do attribute knowledge in ‘fake barn’ cases (Colaço et al. 2014; Turri 2017). Others show that judgments about whether a person’s mental state counts as knowledge depend on whether that person’s evidence comes from facts about an object itself or from statistical base rates (Friedman & Turri 2015). Still others have explored issues at the intersection of formal semantics and epistemology, exploring the impact of specific linguistic factors on knowledge attributions (Schaffer & Szabó 2014).

We have been focusing in on four specific areas in which there have been especially prominent contributions from experimental philosophy, but we should emphasize that it is not as though the majority of experimental philosophy research falls into one or another of these areas. On the contrary, research in experimental philosophy is highly diverse, and it has actually been getting steadily more heterogeneous in recent years.

First, experimental philosophers have been pursuing an ever more diverse array of topics. On one hand, there has been a surge of experimental research using more formal, mathematical tools, including work on causation using Bayes nets (e.g., Livengood & Rose 2016). and work in formal semantics on everything from gradable adjectives to conditionals to epistemic modals (Liao & Meskin 2017; Cariani & Rips 2017; Khoo 2015). On the other, there has been a proliferation of work addressing core topics in the humanities, including art, religion and even questions at the intersection of experimental philosophy and the history of philosophy (De Cruz & De Smedt 2016; Liao et al. 2014; Nichols 2015).

Secondly one finds an ever-growing diversity of experimental methods. There are still plenty of studies that proceed by giving participants vignettes and asking for their intuitions, but in contemporary experimental philosophy, one also finds studies using corpora (Reuter 2011), reaction times (Philips & Cushman 2017), neuroimaging (Greene et al. 2001), even studies that look at whether ethics professors actually behave ethically (Schwitzgebel & Rust 2014).

Finally, and perhaps most noticeably, there is an increasingly close connection between research in experimental philosophy and research in psychology. For example, the experimental research program on intuitions about trolley problems has been dominated by contributions from psychology (e.g., Cushman et al. 2006; Wiegmann et al. 2012), but there have also been important contributions from philosophers (e.g., Mikhail 2011; Kahane & Shackel 2008). Conversely, there have been numerous recent papers in psychology that aim to contribute to research programs that originated in experimental philosophy (Samland & Waldmann 2016; Feldman & Chandrashekar forthcoming; Starmans & Friedman 2012).

3. Challenges to Experimental Philosophy

As is the case with any healthy research area, there is lots of dispute about issues within experimental philosophy. There are disagreements about particular studies, the implications of different kinds of results, and so on. But there are also broad challenges to the very idea that experimental philosophy research could prove helpful in addressing the philosophical questions. We focus here on three of the most prominent of these challenges.

3.1 Disputing the Role of Intuitions in Philosophy

As we’ve seen, much work in experimental philosophy presupposes that intuitions play an important role in philosophical inquiry. Work in the negative program characteristically starts with the assumption that intuitions play a central role in the philosophical tradition. Outside of the negative program, experimental philosophers want to understand what people’s intuitions are about philosophical matters and why they have these intuitions. Several philosophers, however, challenge the role of intuitions in philosophy in ways that also pose a challenge to the philosophical significance of much experimental philosophy.

One way to reject the role of intuitions is simply to deny that philosophers use intuitions as justification for their views (Williamson 2007; Cappelen 2012; Deutsch 2009, 2010, 2015). According to such “intuition deniers”, the experimental investigation of intuitions is thoroughly irrelevant to philosophy (e.g., Cappelen 2012: 1; for discussion, Nado 2016). Obviously if this is right, then the negative program is arguing against a thoroughly mistaken conception of philosophy.

Although work in metaphilosophy often assumes that philosophers use intuitions as evidence, this is exactly what is challenged by intuition deniers. It is granted on all sides that philosophers sometimes mention intuitions, but according to the intuition deniers, intuitions are not integral to the philosophical work. In particular, intuition deniers maintain that a careful inspection of philosophical practice reveals that philosophers don’t rely on intuitions to justify philosophical views; rather, philosophers rely on arguments (see, e.g., Cappelen 2012: 170; Deutsch 2009: 451).

There have been several responses to the intuition deniers, but perhaps the most prominent response to is that the arguments of intuition deniers depend on an implausibly strong conception of the notion of intuition (e.g., Chalmers 2014; Devitt 2015; Weinberg 2014). Once we focus on a less demanding notion of intuition, it’s plausible that philosophers often rely on intuitions as evidence for philosophical theses (Devitt 2015). Indeed, some have argued that for classic examples like Gettier cases, it’s hard to see how the argument works if it doesn’t rely on intuitions (see, e.g., Brown 2017; Sytsma & Livengood 2015: 92–93) Experimental philosophers have also argued against intuition deniers on experimental grounds, noting that a recent study found that over 50% of philosophers agree with the statement “intuitions are useful for justifying philosophical claims” (Kuntz & Kuntz 2011; see Sytsma & Livengood 2015: 91).

A rather different way to challenge the study of intuitions in experimental philosophy is to deny that the study of intuitions is an apt subject matter for philosophical inquiry. On this view, we can grant that it’s a fact that philosophers rely on intuitions, but it’s a lamentable fact. The use of intuitions in philosophy is misguided for reasons that have nothing in particular to do with experimental philosophy—the appeal to intuitions is a relic, which should be rejected because it doesn’t actually answer the philosophical questions. This conclusion threatens positive applications of experimental philosophy (see, e.g., sections 2.2–2.4 ), but is of course, perfectly consistent with the conclusion urged by the negative program in experimental philosophy ( section 2.1 ).

One influential argument against the use of intuitions builds on the rejection of descriptivist theories of reference, according to which concepts refer to kinds via a set of associated descriptions. In place of descriptivism, some maintain that concepts refer in virtue of the function of the concept (e.g., Millikan 2000). Other views maintain that concepts refer in virtue of a causal chain connecting the concept to the kind (Putnam 1973). On these anti-descriptivist views, people can have wildly mistaken intuitions regarding the application of their concepts. As a result, probing lay intuitions might be an ineffective way to investigate the kinds of things to which our concepts refer (e.g., Fischer 2015; Kornblith 2002).

Anti-descriptivism itself doesn’t entail that appeal to intuitions is philosophically irrelevant. Indeed, some of the most influential arguments against descriptivist theories of reference seem to depend on intuitions (Devitt 2015). However, some argue that rather than relying on intuitions about kinds, we should investigate the kinds themselves. So, if the concept knowledge picks out a natural kind, we can consult the distribution and characteristics of knowledge as it is instantiated in the world. Using intuitions to understand knowledge would be like using intuitions to understand gold. The way we come to understand the nature of gold is to examine samples of gold rather than people’s intuitions about gold. Similarly, the way to understand knowledge is to examine samples of knowledge as it presents in animals, rather than people’s intuitions about knowledge (Kornblith 2002). To examine knowledge by intuitions is at best inefficient, and at worst a complete distraction from the task of understanding what knowledge is. This objection is primarily directed at traditional forms of conceptual analysis, but insofar as experimental philosophy focuses on intuitions, it is in the same leaky boat (Kornblith 2013: 197).

The claim that philosophers shouldn’t rely on intuitions constitutes a broad attack on conceptual analysis, in both its traditional and experimental guises. Not surprisingly, there have been several defenses of the importance of intuitions for doing philosophy. For instance, some philosophers argue that in order even to pick out the kind of interest, we need to rely on our intuitive sense of what belongs in the category (e.g., Goldman 2015). To determine the characteristics of knowledge, we need to have a way of picking out which items are genuine members of the kind, and for this we must rely on our intuitive understanding of knowledge. In addition, if we reject outright the appeal to what intuitively belongs to a category, it’s hard to make sense of the intelligibility of eliminativism (e.g., Bermúdez 2006: 305), since eliminativists typically argue that there is a mismatch between intuitive notions of, e.g., free will, and the kinds of things in the world. To give up on the significance of characterizing our intuitive commitments is to preemptively exclude eliminativist views, which have long been regarded as of central philosophical interest.

A second objection would be that even if intuitions do matter, we should not be concerned with just any old kind of intuition. Rather, our concern should be with a distinctive class of intuitions. For example, research in philosophy has traditionally been conducted by trained philosophers who spent years thinking about difficult problems. There is good reason to suspect that the intuitions generated by this type of process will have a special sort of epistemic status, and perhaps these sorts of intuitions can play a legitimate role in philosophy. By contrast, the intuitions explored within experimental philosophy research tend to be those of ordinary folks, with no prior background in philosophy, and one might think that intuitions of this latter type have no real philosophical significance.

One way of spelling out this concern is in terms of what has come to be known as the expertise objection . The key contention here is that trained philosophers have a distinctive type of expertise. Thus, if we want to understand the process at the core of traditional philosophical practice, we need to study people who have this type of expertise. It is no good just looking at the judgments of people who have never taken a single philosophy course. A number of philosophers have developed objections along more or less these lines though with important differences (Williamson 2007; Ludwig 2007).

This is an important objection, and to address it, experimental philosophers launched a major effort to study the intuitions of trained philosophers. The results show that trained philosophers still show order effects (Schwitzgebel & Cushman 2012), actor/observer effects (Tobia et al. 2013), and effects of temperament (Schulz, Cokely, & Feltz 2011). Thus, existing work provides at least some evidence against the claim that trained philosophers have a distinctive expertise that allows them to escape the sorts of biases that plague the judgments of ordinary folks.

Of course, there are numerous ways of defending the objection against this type of response. It could be argued that although philosophers do not have an ability to avoid biases of the type studied within experimental philosophy, their judgments do differ from those of ordinary folks in some other important respect. Similarly, it could be argued that what gives certain intuitions their privileged epistemic state is not the fact that they come from a particular type of person (trained philosophers) but rather the fact that they are the product of a particular way of approaching the question (sustained reflection) (see, e.g., Kauppinen 2007).

Finally, it might be objected that experimental philosophy simply isn’t philosophy at all. On this view, there are certain properties that differentiate work in philosophy from work in other disciplines. Research in experimental philosophy lacks these properties and is therefore best understood as falling outside the philosophical tradition entirely. Note that this last objection is not concerned with the question as to whether experimental philosophy has any value but rather with the question as to whether it should be considered part of a particular discipline. As one recent paper puts it,

… what is at issue is not whether there is room for such empirical study, but whether there is room for it now as a branch of philosophy . (Sorell forthcoming: 6)

In actual practice, debate over this objection has tended to focus on questions in the history of philosophy. Clearly, numerous philosophers from Aristotle through Nietzsche were deeply concerned with empirical questions about human nature, so it might seem that the default view, at least in the absence of any counterarguments, should be that work on these issues can indeed count as philosophy. The key question, then, is whether there are any legitimate counterarguments.

One possible argument would be that although the people we now regard as philosophers did work on these issues, this aspect of their work should not be regarded as falling within the discipline of philosophy. Anthony Appiah questions this gambit:

You would have a difficult time explaining to most of the canonical philosophers that this part of the work was echt philosophy and that part of their work was not. Trying to separate out the “metaphysical” from the “psychological” elements in this corpus is like trying to peel a raspberry. (Appiah 2008: 13)

According to this response, there is a well-established practice within the history of philosophy of exploring empirical and psychological questions, and it is actually the idea of carefully separating the psychological from the philosophical that should be regarded as a departure from philosophical tradition.

More recent work on these issues has been concerned especially with the early modern period. It has been noted that some of the most prominent philosophers in this period actually conducted experimental studies (Sytsma & Livengood 2015), and some explicitly referred to themselves as ‘experimental philosophers’ (Anstey & Vanzo 2016). Though contemporary experimental philosophy obviously differs in certain respects from these historical antecedents, one might argue that the work of contemporary experimental philosophers is best understood as a continuation of this broad historical tradition.

On the other side, it has been argued that this historical continuity picture fails to take account of a change in the use of the word ‘philosophy’ (Sorell forthcoming). In the Renaissance, physics was referred to as ‘philosophy,’ but we would not say that all research in contemporary physics belongs in the discipline of philosophy. Similarly, even if work on the psychology of moral judgment was historically classified as philosophy, one might think that it should not be regarded today as falling into the discipline of philosophy but rather into a distinct discipline.

Certainly, partisans on both sides of this debate should agree that the boundaries of a discipline can change over time, but this point cuts both ways. Just as the boundaries of a discipline may have changed in the past, they can change in the future. It will therefore be interesting to see how the boundaries of the discipline of philosophy evolve over the course of the next few decades and how this evolution impacts the status of experimental philosophy.

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Experimentalism

Experimentalism is one part of modernism and postmodernist literature. Writers take risks, try strange new techniques, and attempt to create something that’s never been seen before. 

Writers who try to create experimental poetry want to provide readers with a new point of view . They are uninterested in walking the same ground as poets and authors before them. Instead, they are willing to take risks and try things, as the examples below prove, that some readers may not understand. 

Experimentalism pronunciation: ex-per-eh-men-tahl-eh-zum

Explore Experimentalism

• 1 Experimentalism Definition
• 2 Examples of Experimental Literature 
• 3 The Computer’s First Christmas Card by Edwin Morgan 
• 4 FAQs 
• 5 Related Literary Terms 
• 6 Other Resources 

Experimentalism Definition

Experimentalism is a term used to describe poetry and other forms of literature that pushed the boundaries of what was considered literature during the modernist and post-modernist movements.

Some of this poetry has been widely accepted by readers around the world, while other examples are still considered quite difficult to understand and have yet to be welcomed into the mainstream. 

These poets were seeking out a new way of telling stories and evoking feelings. They were interested in surprising readers in many different ways. They did this through fractured images, experimentation with spacing and word choice, visual art additions to their work, found poetry , cut-ups, and more. 

Examples of Experimental Literature 

The humument  by tom phillips.

This example of found poetry is a perfect combination of the world of visual art and that of written art.  The Humument  is a work in progress that Phillips began in the 1960s. 

It is an altered Victorian book that he found in a second-hand shop and has since been deleting and painting into. He allows some of the original text to show through the paintings, creating poems and statements, as well as a larger story within the artwork. 

The work tells a nonlinear story with a narrator and  protagonist  named Bill Troge. This experimental piece of poetry is often studied by artists and writers. 

A Throw of the Dice by Stéphane Mallarmé

This very experimental poem was written by 19th-century French poet Stéphane Mallarmé. The poem takes an unusual form, using different amounts of blank space between words and lines. The lines are also indented to different degrees. This piece was published in 1897. It spans a total of twenty pages. 

Here are the first few lines: 

     NOTHING               of the memorable crisis                        or might                                   the event        have been accomplished in view of all results  null                                                                                                                              human

The best way to read this poem is by looking at the original text. The spacing between the words, and lines, make the experience very different. 

The Cantos by Ezra Pound  

This collection of poems was composed while Pound was in prison in Pisa in 1945, just after the Second World War ended. Throughout, the poet takes the reader through Odysseus’ journey into the underworld, providing readers with a new take on the story. The first poem starts in the middle of the action, a technique known as in medias res . Here are the first lines: 

And then went down to the ship, Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and We set up mast and sail on that swart ship, Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also Heavy with weeping, and winds from sternward Bore us out onward with bellying canvas, Circe’s this craft, the trim-coifed goddess. Then sat we amidships, wind jamming the tiller, Thus with stretched sail, we went over sea till day’s end. 

The Cantos are 800 pages and are considered to be incomplete, along with being a very challenging read. 

Read more Ezra Pound poems . 

The Computer’s First Christmas Card by Edwin Morgan 

This experimental poem was written in the mid-1900s. It presents readers with an interesting concept—a Christmas card written by a computer. The reader is asked to peruse numerous lines of compound words. This pokes fun at early computers while also alluding to the progress in the future. Here are the first few lines: 

jollymerry hollyberry jollyberry merryholly happyjolly jollyjelly jellybelly bellymerry hollyheppy jollyMolly marryJerry merryHarry happyBarry

This is only the computer’s first Christmas card, so there are more to come, readers can figure. 

There are endless ways one might write an experimental poem. Plus, what is experimental for one writer might not be for another. One can try automatic writing , cut-outs, found poetry , and false translations as places to start. 

Three of the most common types of poetry are narrative, lyric , and dramatic poetry. But, there are many other styles and genres of poetry that writers have engaged with throughout time. This includes the many types of experimental poetry. 

In modern writing, poets and authors engage with new ideas and practices that help produce literature that surprises readers. They are interested in concepts of individualism and value artistic freedom. Most modern writers also sought to break out of traditional methods of writing. 

Related Literary Terms 

• Found Poetry :  a type of poem that’s created using someone else’s words, phrases, or structure.
• Dadaism : an art and literary movement in Europe during the 20th century. It was a reaction to the senselessness of war during the early 1900s. 
• Avant-garde : the term avant-garde refers to poetry or prose that pushes the boundaries and is experimental.
• Theatre of Cruelty : an experimental genre of theatre that’s concerned more with audience sense-experience than it is with dialogue and content.
• Literary Modernism :  originated in the late 19th and 20th centuries. It was mainly focused in Europe and North America.
• Antinovel : any novel that disregards traditional conventions of novel-writing. These books push the limits of what a novel can be.
• Metafiction : stories in which the characters, author, or narrator acknowledge the fact that they’re parts of a fiction.

Other Resources 

• Watch: Experimental Poetry and the Avant-garde
• Watch: A Poetic Experiment – Walt Whitman Interpreted by Three Animators  

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Baldwin, Emma. "Experimentalism". Poem Analysis , https://poemanalysis.com/definition/experimentalism/ . Accessed 24 August 2024.

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How Does Experimental Psychology Study Behavior?

Purpose, methods, and history

• Why It Matters

What factors influence people's behaviors and thoughts? Experimental psychology utilizes scientific methods to answer these questions by researching the mind and behavior. Experimental psychologists conduct experiments to learn more about why people do certain things.

Overview of Experimental Psychology

Why do people do the things they do? What factors influence how personality develops? And how do our behaviors and experiences shape our character?

These are just a few of the questions that psychologists explore, and experimental methods allow researchers to create and empirically test hypotheses. By studying such questions, researchers can also develop theories that enable them to describe, explain, predict, and even change human behaviors.

For example, researchers might utilize experimental methods to investigate why people engage in unhealthy behaviors. By learning more about the underlying reasons why these behaviors occur, researchers can then search for effective ways to help people avoid such actions or replace unhealthy choices with more beneficial ones.

Why Experimental Psychology Matters

While students are often required to take experimental psychology courses during undergraduate and graduate school , think about this subject as a methodology rather than a singular area within psychology. People in many subfields of psychology use these techniques to conduct research on everything from childhood development to social issues.

Experimental psychology is important because the findings play a vital role in our understanding of the human mind and behavior.

By better understanding exactly what makes people tick, psychologists and other mental health professionals can explore new approaches to treating psychological distress and mental illness. These are often topics of experimental psychology research.

Experimental Psychology Methods

So how exactly do researchers investigate the human mind and behavior? Because the mind is so complex, it seems like a challenging task to explore the many factors that contribute to how we think, act, and feel.

Experimental psychologists use a variety of different research methods and tools to investigate human behavior. Methods in the experimental psychology category include experiments, case studies, correlational research, and naturalistic observations.

Experiments

Experimentation remains the primary standard in psychological research. In some cases, psychologists can perform experiments to determine if there is a cause-and-effect relationship between different variables.

The basics of conducting a psychology experiment involve:

• Randomly assigning participants to groups
• Operationally defining variables
• Developing a hypothesis
• Manipulating independent variables
• Measuring dependent variables

One experimental psychology research example would be to perform a study to look at whether sleep deprivation impairs performance on a driving test. The experimenter could control other variables that might influence the outcome, varying the amount of sleep participants get the night before.

All of the participants would then take the same driving test via a simulator or on a controlled course. By analyzing the results, researchers can determine if changes in the independent variable (amount of sleep) led to differences in the dependent variable (performance on a driving test).

Case Studies

Case studies allow researchers to study an individual or group of people in great depth. When performing a case study, the researcher collects every single piece of data possible, often observing the person or group over a period of time and in a variety of situations. They also collect detailed information about their subject's background—including family history, education, work, and social life—is also collected.

Such studies are often performed in instances where experimentation is not possible. For example, a scientist might conduct a case study when the person of interest has had a unique or rare experience that could not be replicated in a lab.

Correlational Research

Correlational studies are an experimental psychology method that makes it possible for researchers to look at relationships between different variables. For example, a psychologist might note that as one variable increases, another tends to decrease.

While such studies can look at relationships, they cannot be used to imply causal relationships. The golden rule is that correlation does not equal causation.

Naturalistic Observations

Naturalistic observation gives researchers the opportunity to watch people in their natural environments. This experimental psychology method can be particularly useful in cases where the investigators believe that a lab setting might have an undue influence on participant behaviors.

What Experimental Psychologists Do

Experimental psychologists work in a wide variety of settings, including colleges, universities, research centers, government, and private businesses. Some of these professionals teach experimental methods to students while others conduct research on cognitive processes, animal behavior, neuroscience, personality, and other subject areas.

Those who work in academic settings often teach psychology courses in addition to performing research and publishing their findings in professional journals. Other experimental psychologists work with businesses to discover ways to make employees more productive or to create a safer workplace—a specialty area known as human factors psychology .

Experimental Psychology Research Examples

Some topics that might be explored in experimental psychology research include how music affects motivation, the impact social media has on mental health , and whether a certain color changes one's thoughts or perceptions.

History of Experimental Psychology

To understand how experimental psychology got where it is today, it can be helpful to look at how it originated. Psychology is a relatively young discipline, emerging in the late 1800s. While it started as part of philosophy and biology, it officially became its own field of study when early psychologist Wilhelm Wundt founded the first laboratory devoted to the study of experimental psychology.

Some of the important events that helped shape the field of experimental psychology include:

• 1874 - Wilhelm Wundt published the first experimental psychology textbook, "Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie" ("Principles of Physiological Psychology").
• 1875 - William James opened a psychology lab in the United States. The lab was created for the purpose of class demonstrations rather than to perform original experimental research.
• 1879 - The first experimental psychology lab was founded in Leipzig, Germany. Modern experimental psychology dates back to the establishment of the very first psychology lab by pioneering psychologist Wilhelm Wundt during the late nineteenth century.
• 1883 - G. Stanley Hall opened the first experimental psychology lab in the United States at John Hopkins University.
• 1885 - Herman Ebbinghaus published his famous "Über das Gedächtnis" ("On Memory"), which was later translated to English as "Memory: A Contribution to Experimental Psychology." In the work, Ebbinghaus described learning and memory experiments that he conducted on himself.
• 1887 - George Truball Ladd published his textbook "Elements of Physiological Psychology," the first American book to include a significant amount of information on experimental psychology.
• 1887 - James McKeen Cattell established the world's third experimental psychology lab at the University of Pennsylvania.
• 1890 - William James published his classic textbook, "The Principles of Psychology."
• 1891 - Mary Whiton Calkins established an experimental psychology lab at Wellesley College, becoming the first woman to form a psychology lab.
• 1893 - G. Stanley Hall founded the American Psychological Association , the largest professional and scientific organization of psychologists in the United States.
• 1920 - John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner conducted their now-famous Little Albert Experiment , in which they demonstrated that emotional reactions could be classically conditioned in people.
• 1929 - Edwin Boring's book "A History of Experimental Psychology" was published. Boring was an influential experimental psychologist who was devoted to the use of experimental methods in psychology research.
• 1955 - Lee Cronbach published "Construct Validity in Psychological Tests," which popularized the use of construct validity in psychological studies.
• 1958 - Harry Harlow published "The Nature of Love," which described his experiments with rhesus monkeys on attachment and love.
• 1961 - Albert Bandura conducted his famous Bobo doll experiment, which demonstrated the effects of observation on aggressive behavior.

Experimental Psychology Uses

While experimental psychology is sometimes thought of as a separate branch or subfield of psychology, experimental methods are widely used throughout all areas of psychology.

• Developmental psychologists use experimental methods to study how people grow through childhood and over the course of a lifetime.
• Social psychologists use experimental techniques to study how people are influenced by groups.
• Health psychologists rely on experimentation and research to better understand the factors that contribute to wellness and disease.

A Word From Verywell

The experimental method in psychology helps us learn more about how people think and why they behave the way they do. Experimental psychologists can research a variety of topics using many different experimental methods. Each one contributes to what we know about the mind and human behavior.

Shaughnessy JJ, Zechmeister EB, Zechmeister JS. Research Methods in Psychology . McGraw-Hill.

Heale R, Twycross A. What is a case study? . Evid Based Nurs. 2018;21(1):7-8. doi:10.1136/eb-2017-102845

Chiang IA, Jhangiani RS, Price PC.  Correlational research . In: Research Methods in Psychology, 2nd Canadian edition. BCcampus Open Education.

Pierce T.  Naturalistic observation . Radford University.

Kantowitz BH, Roediger HL, Elmes DG. Experimental Psychology . Cengage Learning.

Weiner IB, Healy AF, Proctor RW. Handbook of Psychology: Volume 4, Experimental Psychology . John Wiley & Sons.

By Kendra Cherry, MSEd Kendra Cherry, MS, is a psychosocial rehabilitation specialist, psychology educator, and author of the "Everything Psychology Book."